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SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 



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SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 



BY 



E. T. CAMPAGNAC 

Professor of Education in the University of Liverpool 



CAMBRIDGE 

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1922 






TO 

C.S.J. 



'^ DS- ^ X 



PREFACE 

MY thanks are due, and I desire to pay them to 
a few friends who have had the kindness to 
read these chapters in manuscript and have given 
me the benefit of their criticism and advice, and then 
have been patient enough to help me in preparing 
them for the press. 

And thanks, again, to the Editor of The Times 
Educational Supplement for his generous permission 
to use (in Chapters VII and VIII) parts of articles 
on "The Organisation of Ideals" and on "The 
Specialist of the Future" which I wrote for him 
several years ago. 

And thanks, not least, to the officials of the Cam- 
bridge University Press for their care and their 
courtesy, both inexhaustible. 



E. T. CAMPAGNAC. 



Abercromby House, 
Liverpool. 

March, 1922. 



dW f.iriix(X-qBei-q fjLev (av) apiara KaB* ev Koi larpbs koI 
yvfJiva(TTr]<s kol 7ras aXXos 6 KadoXov elSws, ri Tracriv rj tois toiowtSi 
(tou KOivov yap at iTnarTTJfxai Xeyovrat t€ Kat eicriv) • ov /Jirjv dXX' 
ei/ds Tivos ovScv tcrtos KtuXvct KaXS><s iTnfieXrjO^vai /cat dveTrto-Tiy- 
^ova ovTa, reOeafxevov 8' d/cpt^ws to. (rvfipaivovra i<f) e/cdcTTo) 8t' 
c/iTTCt/atar, KadaTrep /cat tarpot cviot So/couo-iv iavriov apiOTOt cti/ai, 
erepto ouScv av Swd/ievoL CTrap/cecrat. ovScv 8' ^ttov to-ws T<p yc 
PovXofxevta Te)(yiK<a yeveo-^ai Kat 6e<i)pr]TLK<S eirl to Ka^oXou 
/BaSiarreov etvat 8o^ei€V dv, Kd/cetvo yv(i}pLaT€OV ws evSej^crat- 
eiprjTai yap on irepl rovd' al C7rtorT^/xat. 

Aristotle ; Ethics x. ix. i6, 17. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

THE ETERNAL SOCIETY 

Society — the earliest already governed by an ideal (i). Progress 
of civilisation, tests of. Labour and repose (2-3). The individual 
and society: difficulties and advantages of elementary forms of 
society : relationships few and simple : significance of parts in and 
for the whole more easily perceived than in a later and more 
elaborate society. Loss of unity and causes of this; both in the 
individual and in society itself (3-7). Variety and confusion. The 
separation of interest from interest (8). The recovery of unity, 
and the remaking of society. The spirit of man (9-10). 

CHAPTER II 

EDUCATION— THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 
AND ITS MEMBERS 

Education the process by which men discover themselves: other 
accounts of education (12). Education, scientific and humane: 
the value and the danger of this distinction ( 13, 14). Specialisation 
and specialists (15). Variety and concentration (16). A man and 
his neighbours (18). Education and instruction (19). Analogy 
between society and the individual (22). Self-realisation and 
escape from self (23). The busy man (24). Distracting duties; 
society, the temporal and the eternal. 

CHAPTER III 

AGENTS AND PROCESSES 

The safeguarding of the young (28). Parents unable to give the 
care and the time needed (29). They therefore employ deputies 
— caretakers or teachers (29, 30). This delegation of parental work 
to other persons dictated not only by economic necessity. The 



viii CONTENTS 

claims of society upon parents contrasted, yet to be reconciled 
with those of the young (32). The family and the child (33). The 
removal of the child from parents and family (35). Caretakers, 
or teachers, are not only deputies for parents, but servants of 
society. School and nursery; rich and poor {37). 



CHAPTER IV 

NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 

Caretaking further described: control and suggestion (40, 41). 
Exercise. Wild animals, tame animals, and children compared 
(43. 44)- Preparation for life, and " breaking-in." Nature and 
second nature (45). Freedom and convention: the protection of 
society, and the protection of children — ^against themselves (47). 
Play; its uses. The conservation of children (50). Children must 
live — and let live (51). The open road, and the main road (52). 
Fellow travellers, and inns (53). 

CHAPTER V 

CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 

Speech and subjects of speech (54-55): new language for new 
experience; new meanings for familiar words (56-59); teaching — 
the art of interpretation (61). Life, consists not in a multitude 
of possessions (63-64). Loneliness — a mode of relationship (65). 
Self-sufficiency and the recognition of society (66). Means and 
matters for communication (67). 



CHAPTER VI 

LIFE AND LANGUAGE 

Commerce in things and in ideas (68-69). The discovery of the 
world, of oneself (70-71). The teacher helps in this discovery 
(73-74). Home and the world (75). The citizen of the world (76). 
The narrowness of the professional (77-78). Honest trespassing 
(79). The " curriculum " drawn by a poet. 



CONTENTS ix 

CHAPTER VII 

SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 

Man creates his gods and claims for himself a world as large as 
he assigns to them (82-83). The language of religion — ^justified 
(83-84). " The curriculum " — the race-course, the training stable; 
the world, the high-road and the school (85-86). Preparation for 
life — and for earning a living — the responsibility and the power 
of theschool for both (87-90). " General" and "vocational" educa- 
tion (91-92). Education of many grades, but of one kind : scholar- 
ship and business (94-96). 

CHAPTER VIII 

SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 

Complaints made against the teacher — their number and variety 
evidence of the consideration paid to him (97-98). But these 
complaints are often unjust — it is not the teacher who decides 
what is to be taught (98-101). Science and sciences — the demand 
for — its meaning, and its meaninglessness (102-103). Men of 
science compared with flowers (104). Organisation — our distaste 
for: its proper significance (105-107). System in education: the 
dangers of specialisation (lio-iii). The unifying power of belief 
(112). 

CHAPTER IX 

WORK AND PLAY 

Claims nowadays made for freedom and "individuality" : difficulty 
of understanding what these words mean (113-114). Professor 
Nunn on the " Spirit of Play " (i 15-1 16). Work and play (i 18-1 19). 
Difference between them (120). "Freedom" and "spontaneity" 
(122). Protection involves restraint (123). 

CHAPTER X 

ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 

What must be and what may be (125). The seriousness of infancy 
and childhood (126-127). We learn the meaning of play when we 
learn the need of work (128-129). Self-discovery (130). Scales 



X CONTENTS 

of value inherited, discovered and used (133). The true gram- 
marian (135). Experimentation and originaUty (136-139). To save 
labour is to save time (i 40-141). Leisure and the mastery of 
instruments: technique and play (142-143). 

CHAPTER XI 
OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 

Our neighbours — other than ourselves: but to be understood 
(144-145); and used, but on the condition of understanding them 
better (146-147). Egotism, blameless and bad (148): Familiarity, 
and dullness: strangeness and newness (151). Self-interest (152). 
Class-distinctions; their value; corresponding to functions (153- 
154). Grades and orders of merit; unifying oneself (155). Differ- 
ences devised for the sake of an intelligible and tolerable unity 
{156-157)- 

CHAPTER XII 
UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 

Every man has his place; but some places are more desired than 
others (158-159). A man's value in relation to his place, and his 
value as a man (160-161). The distribution of places: Plato on 
place or function (164). The best places not the easiest to fill: 
asceticism demanded of men who are to fill the best places (164- 
166). Self-sacrifice and self-realisation: unconscious perfection 
(168-169). Mechanical and intelligent co-operation (170-174). 
A heavenly tedium (174). Speech the instrument of analysis 
and of reconstruction (175-177). 

CHAPTER XIII 

ARTISTS AND MEN 

Art and convention; Fashion and fashions; Faith and faiths 
(178-179). Extraordinary ordinariness: "a young man of lively 
parts" (180-181). The artist — the egotist (184-185). The penalty 
of egotism (186-187). The plain man — ^his breadth of view and 
variety of experience. The claim of the artist, how sustained. 
He seeks immortality, and wins it at the price of death (187-188). 



CONTENTS xi 

CHAPTER XIV 

THE TEACHER'S ART 

Artists and players — professional players and gentlemen (189- 
191). The respectable amateur, and the would-be Bohemian. 
The concentration of the artist upon his task (192). Self-con- 
sciousness and disease; delicacy and health. The great vocation 
(194). The teacher an artist: arraigned as a fanatic and a tyrant, 
and often tempted to be both. Escape from these dangers (195- 
196). The teacher a creator — in what sense. The condition on 
which he traffics with the world. 

CHAPTER XV 

IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 

The present demand for education prompted by the desire for 
conversation, for entrance into the human society (199-200). 
Society and the best society: an educated society (201). Excel- 
lence won by limitation; resentment against limitation (203-206). 
Leisure and learning — and wisdom (208). Leisure and vacuity 
(212). Isolation and a common humanity (213). 

CHAPTER XVI 

SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 

Emancipation (214). The language of parables (215). Destiny 
and vocation: vocation surpassed (216-217). Governor and 
governed (218-221). The fruits of education (222). Goodness 
uses knowledge and skill as instruments; but makes them more 
than instruments by absorbing them in itself (224). Listening to 
silence; the practice of meditation (225). Pain, suffered willingly 
and intelligently, hastens the coming of a new and unified society 
(226). 



CHAPTER I 
THE ETERNAL SOCIETY 

IF by the slow steps of plodding research or by the 
quick passage of poetic imagination, we make our 
way back to the earliest time of which we have any 
records, or to the simplest forms of human existence 
which we can picture to ourselves, we find that already 
men lived in a society composed of different elements, 
each one of which justified its existence by contri- 
buting what it was best able to contribute and drawing 
from the others what they could provide more richly 
and abundantly in order to make good its own defects. 
But these services rendered and received, however 
various they were, had a common end, and that end 
was the maintenance of human life; and it is quite 
clear, whether we have recourse to the evidence of 
historians or to the more penetrating and subtle evi- 
dence of poets, that man's life did not consist even 
in its barest, rudest form in the things which he ate, 
the garments with which he was clothed, or of any 
or all of the material things without which, it is true, 
his life could not have been maintained. The labours, 
super-human as we sometimes call them, which 
primitive people endured in order to live, they en- 
dured not merely in order to live, but in order to live 
in a certain way which seemed to them good. To be 
men, they must be more than men : the work which 
they did was directed towards an ideal, and it was 



2 THE ETERNAL SOCIETY [ch. 

this ideal which co-ordinated and gave unity to the 
various special kinds of work into which their general 
and common labours were already divided. 

The progress of civilisation is marked and tested by 
two criteria; first, we may say that it is a natural and 
proper ambition for men to achieve the things which 
are necessary to the maintenance of life so effectually 
and so speedily as that they may have an ever in- 
creasing security and an ampler leisure for the enjoy- 
ment of their ideal, whatever it may be; but, and this 
is the second criterion, we may with equal truth affirm 
that the progress of civilisation is marked by the 
vividness and reality with which men can apprehend 
(not only when their labours are done, but in the very 
process of those labours) the ideal itself for the sake 
of which they were undertaken. For a man cannot 
be content unless he is able both to delight in his work 
and to rest from his labour. But these conditions of 
happiness depend upon other conditions, or, rather, 
they need to be more fully stated. If, then, a man is 
to delight in his work, he must be convinced that the 
particular occupation in which he is at any moment 
engaged, and all the occupations in which he is suc- 
cessively engaged, contribute every one of them to 
that general end which he calls hfe: and what is more 
than this, that his life is not limited by the satisfaction 
of his individual needs or the fulfilment of his personal 
desires, but is itself a part of a life at once higher and 
wider, to the level of which it is raised, in the ampli- 
tude of which it is merged, the common life, that is 
to say, of his society. And, if rest is a legitimate 



I] THE ETERNAL SOCIETY 3 

object for him, a man must interpret it properly; it 
must be itself an activity of a spirit, well and com- 
pletely equipped with the fruits of the various detailed 
occupations which have engrossed him. 

Now in a primitive and elementary form of society 
men certainly were confronted with some difficulties, 
but by way of compensation may have had some 
advantages, which are not ours. No doubt when our 
early ancestors had wrested from the untamed fields 
or caught in trackless forests the food on which they 
had to live, when they had with rough implements 
built their modest dwellings, clothed themselves with 
the skins of the beasts they had slain, and thrown up 
rough defences against their enemies, they must have 
had little leisure for anything but a weary sleep, little 
opportunity for such rest as we have described. Yet 
it is remarkable that they found time for waking 
dreams, for the building not only of houses but of 
hopes, and it was in these dreams and hopes that they 
found their encouragement for work and their refuge 
and their reward. And we may conceive that, hard 
bestead as they were, they had in one respect the 
better of us who live in a later time a more compli- 
cated life. For, though their needs were urgent and 
they had little store laid by on which to draw, if on 
any day their search for food was unsuccessful, and 
no second line of defence within which to retire from 
the attacks of an insistent foe, yet these urgent needs 
were few and simple and the relation of each of them 
to the supreme need of keeping alive was definite and 
easily understood. 



4 THE ETERNAL SOCIETY [ch. 

In a modern community, though Httle leisure is to 
be enjoyed by the great majority of those who belong 
to what are called the working classes, yet it may be 
fairly claimed that they have a leisure and a security 
which were not granted to early peoples ; and beyond 
the borders of the working classes there are many 
individuals and even large groups of persons who have 
time and energy left over and to spare when they 
have satisfied the needs of life and done such work as 
they are called on to do. The average of leisure and 
the average of security are beyond all question higher 
with us than with our early ancestors. If we are in 
this respect in a position superior to theirs, it is not 
difficult to discover the cause of our advantage ; it is 
that differences of function have been more and more 
closely adapted to differences of native ability, and 
that men have devoted themselves with a special and 
exclusive attention to those activities which they 
could best perform, and in which they could most 
readily render to their neighbours services in return 
for which they would receive those varied rewards 
which, put together, make up a "living." This speciali- 
sation of labour is a natural and indeed inevitable 
tendency, but, if it has had the result of increasing 
efficiency along several lines of work, it has also had 
the result of isolating those who work along one line 
from their fellow-creatures who work along others. 
And there is this further consideration to be noted: 
that, whereas the elementary needs of human life may 
be said to be always the same, the needs for food and 
shelter and clothing, yet the progress (and to be sure 



I] THE ETERNAL SOCIETY 5 

the decay also) of civilisation makes men aware of 
fresh desires which presently become fresh needs. 
Instead of demanding shelter, different men demand 
different kinds of shelter or of food or of clothing: 
they learn to live more delicately and themselves 
become more delicate, and what was sufficient and 
good enough for their ancestors is literally neither 
sufficient nor good enough for them; they could not 
maintain themselves alive with the few and simple 
things which sufficed for their predecessors. Accord- 
ingly, though our leisure may be greater than that 
which men in earlier times enjoyed, both our desires 
and our needs are more numerous and more varied. 
Though by multitudinous devices of specialised in- 
dustry we have come to be able to satisfy our needs 
without leaving even our desires wholly unsatisfied, 
it is much harder for us to relate the special activity 
of any individual or the many varied activities of the 
many diverse sections of society to one common end. 
Yet we postulate a common end in which an individual 
may achieve the unity of his own life in harmony with 
and in subordination to the unity of a society capable 
of embracing both him and his neighbours and in its 
fulness transcending each and all of them. 

The result is strangely disappointing. The in- 
creasing differentiation of the activities of men is to 
be justified, if it is to be justified at all, on two 
grounds ; first, that it will tend to a beautifully articu- 
lated co-operation by which all men may be more and 
more fully released from merely mechanical labour 
and come to be conscious of their mutual dependence 



6 THE ETERNAL SOCIETY [ch. 

and their corporate unity; and, second, that by 
allowing individual men to do whatever special work 
they may have special aptitude for doing they may 
be able to realise themselves, not only in the leisure 
which is the fruit and the prize of work, but in the 
work itself. But the result has been very different 
from this. Men have learnt, not that they are de- 
pendent on one another, but that they are divided 
from one another, and they have been so wholly 
engrossed each one, and each group of them, in the 
routine of their special callings that they have become 
what we call specialists, people, that is to say, who 
have learnt to do some one thing with remarkable 
dexterity and speed, but who are something less than 
complete and healthy human creatures able to enjoy 
themselves and the world. But for all this there 
remains in men a something native and ineradicable, 
the trembling but persistent belief that they are after 
all themselves something more than practitioners in 
various kinds of work, that they make altogether a total 
common unity which they call society or the state. 

This belief, fearfully and doubtfully held, is rarely 
expressed and then fitfully and with apology; or if 
there are any who express it loudly they are those 
who identify their own calling or at best the callings 
most nearly kindred to their own with the sum of 
society and therefore find themselves in opposition 
with others whose voices are as loud as their own, 
their view being as narrow, who in their turn are 
determined to identify their own calling or special 
group of callings with the total. And they are all 



I] THE ETERNAL SOCIETY 7 

wrong for a double reason; first because they leave 
out of their account other callings and groups which 
actually have their place in the world; and secondly, 
because they have mistaken the nature of the only 
total or unity which can properly and effectively em- 
brace men. This effective and proper unity is some- 
thing more than the sum of what is actual, it is an 
ideal. 

Now it must of course be admitted that all men 
are more truly idealists than they are generally 
willing to admit to themselves or to their neighbours; 
for indeed human life would not be tolerable to the 
most stupid or the most gross if they were not at 
times illuminated by the vision of an ideal which, 
though it pales, is never quite extinguished in their 
minds. But the difficulty under which they, the 
stupid and the gross, labour is one which oppresses 
others also, not stupid or gross but merely timid: and 
if we add together the stupid, the gross and the timid 
we shall have accounted for a large proportion of 
mankind. The difficulty may be simply stated: it is 
this: all men seek from time to time to escape from 
the actual into the ideal; but this language is itself 
misleading, for it indicates, not simply a contrast but 
a divorce between the actual and the ideal, it suggests 
a gulf fixed across which there can be no crossing 
made. The haunting ideal, of course, transcends 
the actual but is only to be found in the actual, 
and until it is there sought and found what we 
call the progress of civilisation will only be another 
name for the process by which men are divided 



8 THE ETERNAL SOCIETY [ch. 

from each other, and themselves become an ill- 
assorted conglomeration of diversified interests and 
aptitudes. 

For we cannot but be aware that as there are 
divisions which separate men from men and groups 
of men from other groups of men, so there are divisions 
within a man himself; and just as the divisions which 
mark off men from their fellows prevent them from 
becoming all together a single self-conscious society, 
so these other divisions within the individual prevent 
him from becoming and realising himself. Speciali- 
sation, to use a current term, commonly means not 
the devotion of the whole of a man's powers to some 
end which is worthy of them and to which .he is 
specially attracted by his special aptitude, an end 
which might at once satisfy him and enable him to 
satisfy the claims of a composite but unified society. 
It means something quite different from this: the 
exercise and absorption of some particular power or 
faculty in a man which nature or training or accident 
has brought to greater strength and a higher develop- 
ment than his other powers or faculties, and the 
cultivation of this power or faculty to the neglect of 
the others. 

It may, of course, be said that however exclusively 
a man may in this latter sense have specialised, the 
necessities of ordinary human life compel him to 
engage in more activities than one and therefore to 
exhibit himself in several, if only a few, roles. For 
example, a man may be a dog-fancier or a gas-fitter 
or a professional politician and may devote himself to 



I] THE ETERNAL SOCIETY 9 

the special work which is indicated by these titles and 
yet be obliged, for all his pre-occupation with the 
matter which he conceives to be most appropriate to 
his distinctive gifts, to play the parts also of a house- 
holder, a rate-payer, a father, a son ; he may exercise 
his special gift and yet cultivate a taste for roses or 
for wine, or beguile his leisure with collecting Jacobean 
furniture or decorating his drawing-room. And to a 
neighbour or a friend who knew indeed what his 
special calling was, but was not acquainted with him 
merely as a practitioner in that calling he might well 
appear to be a man whose life exhibited a remarkable 
variety of interests. Even to himself such a man may 
appear to be admirable for the range of his own 
activities: but if he will contemplate, as from time to 
time he is forced to contemplate, himself with a more 
critical eye, he may find that what he was proud to 
call the range, the variety of his interests is, in fact, 
evidence of the confusion and purposelessness of his 
life. For he may readily discover that he turns from 
his politics or his plumbing or his dog-breeding to the 
pruning of his roses and the arrangement of his house 
simply by way of escape from the fatigues of those 
engrossing avocations, and again that he passes from 
one to another of his diversions because he is tired 
of each in turn. In each of these several forms of his 
varied activity he may become sadly aware that he 
is missing what would give to each an enduring 
interest and relate each to each. He is, in fact, 
missing himself. 
Now the self which a man seeks and is ill at ease 



10 THE ETERNAL SOCIETY [ch. 

until he finds, is something other and more than the 
sum of the activities in which he is actually engaged 
or of any other activities which he might substitute 
for them or add to them ; in them he may no doubt 
strive to express himself; in them he may with 
lengthening experience and increasing skill learn more 
and more completely to express himself; or once more 
he may discover that by changing or diminishing or 
increasing his activities he comes more perfectly to 
express himself. But if he hopes ever quite satis- 
factorily to express himself in these or any other 
activities, his expectation is foredoomed to dis- 
appointment. For himself must always transcend 
and baffle any form or any number of forms of 
expression, since form must be definite and the spirit 
is infinite. 

Unwilling to yield unquestioningly to this belief 
(though unable to free himself from its hold) a man 
may pretend to be or to have several selves according 
to the several occupations in which he is successively 
employed. At home he may be one man, out-of-doors 
another, with his family a different person from what 
he is with mere acquaintances and so forth, and he 
may even pride himself upon his versatility. Just as 
in the roughly organised group which either propheti- 
cally or ironically we call society the grooves or ruts 
in which men run become so deep that it is difficult 
for them to look over the edge and see their neigh- 
bours, so a man may plough so deeply the divergent 
furrows along which his varied interests move that 
it is difficult for him, that partial self which he tries 



I] THE ETERNAL SOCIETY ii 

to identify with one interest, to look over the edge 
and find himself, again a partial self which he strives 
to identify or to express in another interest. But 
though the effort to find the rest of itself may be 
difficult for a society, yet men as individuals and as 
groups are by nature or destiny driven upon this 
attempt. So from time to time we discover that 
some fresh formula or system is invented and devised 
under which it is hoped to draw together in lively 
wholeness the imperfectly related and therefore con- 
flicting interests whether of a man or of a society. 
Formula succeeds formula, and system displaces 
system, and the quest is still pursued but in vain. 
A formula is after all a mere label, a system is a mere 
arrangement, but what is needed is a principle to 
which reference can be made, a law so intimate in its 
appeal and so universal in its binding force that 
obedience takes the quality of personal loyalty. It 
is not the discovery of a new thing that is needed, it 
is not enough to lay a new stress or put a fresh 
emphasis here or there, it will not help to forge the 
links of a chain by which disparate elements in indi- 
vidual or social life are to be held firmly but uncon- 
genially together — what is needed is something other 
and greater, not a formula or a system or an organisa- 
tion — it is the spirit of a man or of a society which 
is to be discovered. 



CHAPTER II 

EDUCATION— THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 
AND ITS MEMBERS 

EDUCATION is the age-long process by which men 
and societies of men discover, understand and 
take possession of, themselves. This process is not to 
be measured only by its length; its range is as wide 
as the Universe : it is both the proper occupation and 
the final reward of an eternal life. 

Education has indeed been defined in other lan- 
guage than this. We may usefully regard it as the 
sum of the influences which, converging upon us, have 
made us what we are, and are in course of making us 
whatever we are to become; more often when we 
speak of Education we mean those influences which 
are under our control, and which we direct towards 
persons who in one sense or another are in our charge ; 
and sometimes, but more rarely, we mean the in- 
fluences to which we willingly, and deliberately submit 
ourselves. 

There is much to be argued in favour of each of 
these definitions; the best thing that can be said of 
them is, in fact, that they do not conflict any one of 
them with the others. But this best thing is unhappily 
just what is so seldom said that the truth of it is 
commonly forgotten, and so each statement is taken 
as a rival to the others, and in competition with them 
upheld as though it were complete. 



CH. II] EDUCATION 13 

Thus when we say that Education is made up of 
the sum of the influences which bear upon us, we are 
apt to set the World and ourselves in contrast; we 
speak of the World as though it were a great hundred- 
handed artificer moulding us to its will ; or as though 
it were a river which made its way at last into some 
hitherto dry and empty cavern, the hollow vacancy 
of ourselves. But the contrast is not truly drawn, we 
are ourselves not simply clay in the hands of the 
potter; it is our hands (though not our hands alone) 
that fashion the clay; we are not a mere receptacle 
into which the World pours itself, or as much of itself 
as we can hold ; we are part of the generous and wilful 
stream; indeed we may more vigorously maintain 
that, if the World makes us, we make it ; if the World 
gives to us, our gifts to the World are not little or 
few. This at least we may claim : that if a man is to 
discover himself, he must in the same act, or as the 
result of the same series of prolonged efforts, discover 
also his World. It is in and from his World that he 
gets his significance ; it is from him, as from a centre, 
that his world spreads itself out in a circle which 
widens as his self-knowledge becomes more intimate 
and more effective. For to know himself is for a man 
to know both his power and his limitations, and his 
powers are exhibited in operation in the world, in 
which also they find their boundaries. 

In a famous passage Matthew Arnold drew a dis- 
tinction between a humane and a scientific education: 
the distinction has been marked less admirably by 
many persons who unlike Arnold have been reluctant 



14 EDUCATION [ch. 

to reconcile the differences between the two. A 
humane education may quite well be considered to 
be one in which a man draws his chief and most con- 
genial lessons from the conversation of men and from 
the records of their achievements in literature or other 
human documents ; and a scientific education one in 
which he turns more readily, according to his gifts, 
to the operations of natural forces, which he tries to 
understand and to subdue. But the record of men's 
achievement is an account of the efforts they have 
made to live happily, with their fellows, in the world 
of external or natural forces; no poet is a stranger 
to hunger and thirst, to heat and to cold; no philo- 
sopher is unaffected by the conditions of his body or 
the quality of his surroundings. And to study Nature 
is to essay an intelligible account of Nature, in order 
that obeying her laws we may become her allies, if 
not her masters. No man can be so narrow a specialist 
in either department of inquiry as to be wholly 
ignorant of, or unmoved by, what is done in the other. 
It is, perhaps, too late now to complain of a use of 
words which is in fact unfortunate and misleading: 
the study of letters may be scientific; the study of 
"science" may be humane: it may even be un- 
scientific: it is enough to say that either pursuit is 
carried on by man for man's purposes, and that 
neither is followed with advantage if a student arrives 
at his goal less of a man than he might have been. 
Yet the specialisation of industry in learning has had 
precisely this result for large numbers of people. We 
must see that the great field open to human enquiry 



II] THE MAKING OF SOCIETY "^^^^^ 

is not divided into two departments only. " Humane " 
studies are themselves divided into many sections; 
and a man eminent in any one may admit, and will 
often boast of, his ignorance of others. Thik a philo- 
logist may be heard proclaiming that tll^gh he 
"knows" many languages he can speak in nc^lfe^s^e 
his native language, and in that perhaps badly), or 
a popular or a copious writer may have neither know- 
ledge nor feeling for the structure of language. More 
remarkable, more monstrous, is the spectacle of 
literary persons who have no sense of music. Similarly 
"science " is itself divided into many separate sciences, 
and each of these into many provinces: chemistry, 
one is informed, has three or four separate fields, and 
a worker in one is apt to signalise his proficiency in 
that by announcing his lack of acquaintance with 
others. The sum of human knowledge is now so vast 
that any single section of it surpasses the power and 
eludes the grasp of any one man, and the whole mocks 
our struggling imagination. 

A man therefore who hopes to attain a useful or 
even a marketable knowledge of any one department 
must devote himself to that and quite deliberately 
accept a large ignorance of other things: he must 
admit the necessity of forgoing what indeed he cannot 
attain; he cannot attain a mastery of all that is to be 
known in every province which the human mind has 
explored; he can only, and at best, attain a com- 
petent understanding of one small section of a single 
department. To have gone far upon a single track, 
or in going to and fro upon a short stretch of it, to 



:% 



>. 



6 EDUCATION [ch. 

have penetrated the surface of a narrow territory to 
a considerable depth, a depth at any rate consider- 
able enough to prevent him from looking over the 
edge of the entrenchment which his industry has 
made, would seem upon this reckoning to be the best 
that a painful man can hope for. How then can he 
have won the mastery of the world which might seem 
a proper goal for ambition untutored by experience 
to set for itself? But a more searching question 
yet remains — ^how is it possible for a man who has 
followed, as necessity has made him follow, a single 
line of investigation, a single kind of work, to reach 
that self-mastery which is a conscious realisation of 
the variety of his natural powers all fitly exercised, 
and all subordinated to a common end? A man who 
should gain the whole world and lose his own soul 
would be little profited; but that ill-advised barter, 
it would appear, is one which he cannot effect. Are 
we to say then that he is free to effect the still less 
profitable exchange of his own soul, not for the 
world, but for a very small part of it? 

It is the business of education to solve this problem ; 
to enable a man to develop his powers harmoniously 
and to enjoy a world in which they all have room for 
growth and activity. A harmonious development does 
not mean an equal development of all his powers — 
some one of them is certain to be more lively than 
the rest, and some group of them stronger and more 
insistent than the remainder. It means the develop- 
ment of them all, the weaker and the stronger alike, 
upon a plan orderly and intelligible, so that he is in 



ii] THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 17 

the result one man and not a mere name under which 
disparate and disorderly powers wage an uncertain 
and a fruitless war. It is clear further that one man 
will differ from another in the strength, the range, 
and the variety of his powers — he will exhibit a 
greater or a less diversity of gifts, and where his 
neighbour is strong or weak he will be comparatively 
weak or strong ; and however he may differ from his 
neighbour he will, like his neighbour, be himself, a 
being whose powers whatever they may be are co- 
ordinated in such a way that they can be directed 
to an adequate and clearly conceived end, and to- 
gether enable him, like his neighbour, to take happy 
possession of the world. 

But the world of which one man takes possession 
will be a different world from that of his neighbour, 
or, if there is ground common to both, and indeed 
there must be, each will enjoy what is common upon 
a special tenure corresponding with his several powers 
of appropriation; and for one, or the other, or for 
both, there will be a margin where he eludes and 
escapes his neighbour. To be sure, within this margin 
he will find that he has other co-partners; this will 
be common ground between him and them, but they 
in their turn will stretch their dominion over the 
world in directions in which he is unable to follow 
them. What results from this is that, while every 
man may properly be said to have a world which is 
his own, his world is invaded by his fellows, into whose 
world he himself makes his way in turn as an invader. 

The problem of Education may now be stated in 



? 



i8 EDUCATION [ch. 

wider terms — it is to enable a man to become master 
of his own world with a secure possession, and at the 
same time to make him aware of the other worlds of 
Other men, identical in part with his own, in spite of 
all their differences. In fact, his awareness of his 
neighbours, his knowledge of the reality of their 
worlds are conditions of his being aware of himself 
and of knowing the world which he calls distinctively 
his own. Thus we may argue that, even if we regard 
education, for convenience to begin with, as the 
training of the individual to the mastery of himself 
and his world, it is also and at the same time an 
undertaking social or political in its character, since 
the individual cannot receive this training apart from 
his fellows. For, as a man is compact of many powers, 
each of which for its just perfection and its proper 
work depends upon the harmonious development, the 
consonant activity of the others, so a society to be 
fully developed and to exercise its manifold and varied 
energies demands the contributory services of its 
members, each of whom must have achieved humanity 
if society itself is to be humane. But society is not 
yet humane, its members have not yet achieved hu- 
manity, and the business of Education is still to be 
done. So we complain, and not without justice; and 
we look back, and think regretfully of the long while 
that Education has been in process and mourn the 
meagre progress made ; or we look back again and see 
or think we see that once and again in earlier days 
something that better deserved to be called a society 
than our own existed, and that man in that happy 



II] THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 19 

time had attained a roundness of individual develop- 
ment and a more completely fashioned system of 
relationship with each other than we have now. 

And here we must state our problem once again 
and more fully. Education is to make a man master 
of himself and of his own world ; to make him aware 
of his neighbours and their worlds; and (for this is 
what we must now add to what was said earlier), to 
teach him and them together to make of all their 
several worlds a new, a social, world, a society which 
embraces, reconciles and transcends them, and to live 
in that new world. What is important to note is that 
the new social world cannot embrace and reconcile 
the smaller individual worlds unless it transcends 
them. Commonly this is forgotten. There are, no 
doubt, many who identify education with instruction. 
They teach their pupils subjects of which they claim 
some knowledge; they do not teach their pupils to 
be human, to be themselves. Some of these teachers 
of subjects we cannot blame, except for the choice 
they have made of a profession ; they cannot do more 
than they are doing ; they know (something of some) 
subjects, and they earn a hard living by imparting 
what they have hardly acquired. But there are others 
who deserve a gentle censure, for they could do much 
more than teach subjects; they might spread hu- 
manity — or, to be fair, let us say that they do them- 
selves less than justice when they would have us 
believe that they are teaching only subjects; for they 
love their subjects and are not (for all their shy 
affectation) without love for their pupils; they are 



r^ 



20 EDUCATION [ch. 

better than they know; they do more than they 
reckon. But they do less than they might do, if they 
will not admit that at best the subject of which they 
attempt (with what constant courage!) to give a 
knowledge to their pupils is a subject of which they 
must also give their pupils the use. Let them grant 
so much and at once they must admit further that 
it is necessary to reflect upon the nature of the use. 
Of what use is the subject — ^to themselves, to their 
pupils, to the world? 

The question is not idle. For if a man uses any 
knowledge he at once brings it into relation with 
other knowledge which he has ; if he uses any know- 
ledge he exercises some power and brings it into rela- 
tion with his other powers ; he becomes freshly aware 
of himself ; and, more than this, his use of his know- 
ledge, his exercise of his power, brings him into 
relation (whether by conflict, or by alliance) with his 
fellows and with the world. To ask, then, what is the 
use of a subject, is to ask what new relationship the 
possession and exercise of some knowledge or skill 
will set up within a man and between him and society. 
In other words, to acquire and to employ new know- 
ledge causes a man at once to go beyond himself, to 
set up a fresh system of relationship with the world, 
and to improve or damage the relationships which 
he has already established. What is true of an indi- 
vidual is true also of a society of individuals. Any 
activity, any exercise of power, any use of knowledge 
at once makes it more fully, whether painfully or 
pleasantly, aware of its constituent members, and 



II] THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 21 

also of its membership in a vaster, a more ideal, 
society. To be sure, the necessity, the possibility of 
an individual's transcending himself is more quickly 
seen, more readily assumed; for there, beyond him, 
and patent to the dullest sight, are other men, of 
flesh and blood, with whom, in activity, he is brought 
into contact, co-operation, or quarrel; but, as we have 
seen, it is not only of them that he becomes newly 
conscious ; he becomes newly conscious of himself, of 
some total, that is, other and more than the sum of 
his parts and powers, an ideal, a spiritual self. If we 
are at a loss to say to what beyond itself a society 
stretches out when in activity it expands, we may 
recall what is true of the individual. We may have 
no name for that larger and more permanent reality 
to the measure of which he grows; but we have no 
doubt of it. And if we have no titles, except such as 
poets have supplied, for that larger and more per- 
manent reality into which society grows, we need 
and indeed can have as little doubt of it. 

Here a problem of very great difficulty and of very 
subtle fascination awaits us. The larger society of 
which we have spoken is not the mere dull, or splendid, 
aggregate of the multitudinous groups or communities 
in which men have membership, and which together 
make up the visible state or total society. The larger 
is also a spiritual society, and it is this, in fact, which 
gives reality and coherence to the smaller, though 
large, total society or visible state. The problem is 
this — at what point of development in the material 
groups or communities and of the visible state which 



/' 



22 EDUCATION [CH. 

they compose does it become most easy and natural 
for a man to realise his membership of the spiritual 
society, or for the visible state itself to be aware 
that its wide borders are defined by the surrounding 
spiritual region? To assume an analogy between the 
state and the individual is a process which has the 
support of age and of high authority. Plato has argued 
from the state to the individual ; in the state he saw 
written in large letters what might presently be de- 
scried by trained eyes in the smaller character of the 
individual. We may argue from the individual to the 
state, assuming an analogy which may later appear 
to have some justification. 

A man then measures his development by his escape 
from the boundaries of self. He grows as he learns and 
fulfils the claims of his family, of the partners of his 
work, of the members of his party, of his fellow- 
citizens. So we say; but he grows and he learns these 
lessons if at each stage of development, which is no 
doubt marked by his entrance into a larger and more 
elaborate community of human beings, he passes out 
of himself in a manner which cannot be estimated or 
reckoned merely by the increase in the number and 
variety of his communications with men. He passes 
out of himself into a higher self, which often eludes 
his lower or ordinary self, and always escapes his 
fellows. True, he may remember; true, he may be 
aware of, this higher self : he will know that it is that 
which gives significance, outline and unity to the 
ordinary character which is his: and they will realise 
that he is what he appears to them to be because he 



II] THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 23 

is held in the grasp of a force, not other than himself, 
and yet higher than the man as they in the dusty 
traffic of affairs see him. And he and they know, if 
they care to know, more than this; he and they share 
the knowledge that it is in virtue of his frequent or 
rare, but real, passage from his ordinary to his higher 
self, that he is able to pass from the round of his 
individual cares and interests into the larger circle of 
a society's life. And as he moves on with ever 
widening powers into larger and still larger societies 
and groups of men, his progress marked by them is 
measured also, though not perhaps by every eye, by 
a fresh growth of the higher or spiritual self. Always 
the condition of real development, of real increase 
in sympathy and understanding of human affairs, is 
the widening, the deepening of the spiritual man. 
Let us grant at once that an ordinary and busy man 
is seldom aware of what is going on in his own soul ; 
yet from time to time he meets the spiritual reality 
which is in truth himself; he " comes to himself," and 
the re-discovery of himself sets him at once in move- 
ment to renew and to enlarge his relations with his 
fellows. 

But here a danger awaits him. He may come to 
identify the growing multitude of his engagements 
with the growth of his soul. A busy man may become 
that figure for the satirist, an important person. We 
see him, note-book in hand, writing down one more 
in his long list of functions to be performed; he is a 
member of twenty societies, of a hundred com- 
mittees, social, philanthropic, political, learned, and 



24 EDUCATION [ch. 

(who can withstand him?) rehgious. To these he 
gives himself. It is a Hteral account of what he does : 
to these he gives himself, and there is nothing left 
over. He has forgotten the conditions of real growth ; 
for it is the incommunicable, but not unfelt, re- 
mainder which gives worth to whatever a man may 
do in his communication with the world. Without 
that, or if that is lost, he is now but a bundle of labels, 
a string of titles, and, when his engagements have 
been enumerated, all is said that can be said about 
him. Had he stopped earlier, had he refused to admit 
claims which he could not fulfil except at the price 
of his own true life, he might have saved himself and 
been of some real, because of some spiritual, service 
to his fellows. But no; he had the ambition to be a 
"great" man, an "important" person, "a prominent 
citizen." Another man might perhaps have done all 
that he has done, and not been used up, exhausted, 
in the doing; another might beyond the limits of 
things done have had a subtle margin of things 
dreamed, and beyond that an ampler region in which 
no thing could be defined, but in which he himself, 
undistraught, lived at home with himself. Such a 
man could afford to undertake these countless ac- 
tivities. 

Now by every man the decision has to be made for 
himself just at what point or line he will set a limit 
to his outward engagements and activities, since he 
sees that at some point or line he must end them on 
peril of his life. And so it may be for societies and 
states of men; they, like individuals, have an over- 






II] THE MAKING OF SOCIETY 25 

self, a real or spiritual self, which gives significance 
and unity to the visible total of their energies and 
achievements. If their activities are usefully to be 
extended, it must be on condition that they do not 
eat their way into that region, which should remain 
for ever inviolate, of the higher self. 

But if it is believed that no limit can be set now, 
as once limits were set for the sake of clearness and 
sanity, of intelligibility and self-respect, to the out- 
ward and material extension of a state's activities 
and engagements, then the necessity becomes all the 
more urgent for making that sacred zone of the 
spiritual self, which surrounds the visible, ampler and 
deeper, and keeping it for ever safe from the insidious 
encroachment or the violent assault of the most 
alluring or the most clamant of temptations marked 
as duties. 

The business of Education is to give members of 
a visible state the freedom of the eternal society. 



i 



CHAPTER III 
AGENTS AND PROCESSES 

SPECULATIONS such as we have made in the pre- 
ceding chapter are often considered and sometimes 
expressly called idle by men who claim to be practical. 
"If you wish to indulge your fancy," they say to 
persons who are occupied with such problems, " if you 
choose to spin cobwebs and to pose as philosophers, 
so be it : for our part, we must keep the world going, 
must see that the world's work is done; we are not 
philosophers, but plain men." Let us not delay now 
to argue that all philosophers strive to be plain, and 
that all plain men have a philosophy original or 
adopted. Both are engaging themes, but we shall for 
the moment set them aside. Instead of enquiring 
what is the meaning of education, we shall now try 
to set down some of the things which are done in the 
name of education. It will indeed be impossible even 
to make a catalogue of these things without indicating 
however briefly why they are undertaken; but we 
shall pass rapidly over reasons, and record facts as 
clearly as we can. 

First, then, let us note that in ordinary use educa- 
tion is the general name for certain commodities and 
services which men desire, but are not necessarily 
concerned to analyse. Thus food is the general name 
which covers beef and mutton, cabbages and potatoes ; 
drink the general name which covers water and milk, 



CH. Ill] AGENTS AND PROCESSES 27 

beer and wine; the Post Office or the Ministry of 
Health are pubhc services. And these commodities 
are suppHed, these services rendered by persons and 
groups of persons whom the ordinary citizen knows 
how to find when he needs what they can sell him or 
do for him. He needs food, he needs drink, he needs 
the aid of certain national or local services, and he 
applies in the proper quarter for satisfaction when 
these needs overtake him. Or, since these needs are, 
if not continual, at any rate regularly and frequently 
recurring, he is happy to know that at any time, if 
he can pay the price or prove himself entitled to 
receive these commodities and to enjoy these services, 
he can get what he wants. The shops are always 
there, the offices are always there ; he can go to them 
when he chooses. 

What are the commodities, what are the services, 
which men are really seeking when they seek educa- 
tion? We must pause for one moment before we try 
to answer this question, and must ask another, which 
must first be considered. Are they, these men who 
seek education, seeking it for themselves or for others? 
A man might seek food ; if it were for himself, a beef- 
steak might serve ; if it were for his infant son, food 
in a different form and of another kind would be 
appropriate: he might seek drink; if it were for him- 
self, wine might satisfy him; if it were for his child, 
water would satisfy him, because it would satisfy the 
child; and occasions can readily be imagined when 
water would satisfy both him and his child. These 
vulgar examples, we hope, make clear certain im- 



28 AGENTS AND PROCESSES [ch. 

portant truths — obvious, we should have called them, 
but for the fact that though indeed, they are in the 
way so that men trip up over them, they are not 
always remembered. For it is an important truth 
that what is food for a grown man may not be food 
for a child; an important truth also that what is drink 
for a child may be drink for a man, but not the only 
kind of drink. There is truth, too, in the old belief 
that one man's food is another man's poison. With 
these words of preface and explanation, we may now 
say that, when grown people seek education they seek 
it, as a rule and at first for other people, and especially 
for the young, for their children. They discover the 
need of educating themselves later, and more rarely. 
It is about the education which men seek for their 
children that we must make our first inquiry. 
What is it that they expect to get? And, what is of 
equal moment, what is it that their wives expect to 
get? The truth is that most men are so much pre- 
occupied by their business, by the labours which they 
have to put forth to earn a living for themselves and 
their families, that they have no time for their 
children. The men are away at their work from 
morning till evening, and, when they return to their 
homes at the end of the day, it is the end of the day 
that they have reached, and with it the end of their 
energy. They are tired, they are hungry; they need 
rest, recreation, food and sleep. It is the end of the 
day, and their children ought to be going or gone to 
bed. The women are not away from home — not all 
of them, not most of them, though far too many of 



Ill] AGENTS AND PROCESSES 29 

them — but they are at work; they are cleaning their 
homes, cooking, sewing; they are engaged with the 
feeding and rearing of their babies ; they are marketing 
and planning, and occupied in the perpetual problem 
of making both ends meet. They have scanty leisure 
for their children ; even for the nursing of their chil- 
dren they have too little time and too little energy; 
and presently, when necessity no longer compels them 
to devote such meagre gifts of time and energy as 
they have to their children, they are caught back by 
the claims of cleaning, and cooking and sewing, of 
bu5;dng and arranging and acting as stewards and 
managers of the moneys which their husbands earn. 
For them, too, the end of the day brings fatigue ; they 
wake only too often in the morning to fatigue which 
returns with daylight and consciousness. 

An answer, then, not the only answer but the first, 
to our question need not be delayed — when men and 
women ask for education for their children, they are 
seeking a safe place where their children can be kept 
during the day, and trustworthy people who can 
attend to the children, who will "mind" them during 
the hours when the parents themselves are unable to 
take care of them. The place to which the children 
are sent as soon as they can walk to it must be a safe 
place : their homes are not safe ; they are sent to this 
place to be in the charge of persons who can take care 
of them, who will "mind" them: their parents cannot 
take care of them, cannot mind them. These two 
implications are irresistible, but they are not often 
as plainly stated as they ought to be. Facts are facts; 



30 AGENTS AND PROCESSES [ch. 

whether they stand to the credit or the discredit of 
society, they must be acknowledged. 

Another fact is to be stated and reckoned with. 
Children are sent to the safe place, not only because 
their parents are unable to keep them safe at home, 
but because the children are unable to take care of 
themselves. Infancy, the period during which the 
offspring of men and women are unable to take care 
of themselves, is longer than the period in which the 
offspring of other creatures need maternal care. In 
France there is a name beautiful and terrible for 
schools in which the children of the poor are " minded." 
They are called Ecoles maternelles — schools, that is to 
say, where the mothers are absent and other women 
perform the service which mothers might be expected 
to render. For the majority of people it is necessary 
to send their children away from home for the work- 
ing and waking hours of the day. The majority are 
the poor, or those who, lifted above the threshold of 
poverty, are yet so tied and bound by the toil either 
of making a livelihood or of arranging and dispensing 
the fruits of day-long, week-long, life-long labour as 
to have no freedom, no time, no strength for watching 
and guarding their own children. 

But this delegation of parental work to persons 
who are not parents (or are not the parents of those 
whom they in this manner safeguard) is not dictated 
by mere necessity, certainly not by economic ne- 
cessity. For look to the well-to-do and the rich. They 
cast upon other people the care of their children, and 
from an earlier age than do the poor or persons of 



Ill] AGENTS AND PROCESSES 31 

small means. It may not be necessary for the well- 
to-do and the rich to send their children away from 
home; but their houses are larger and the children 
can be sent, banished were perhaps the right word, 
to a remote wing of the house, or to a nursery in 
which they will not disturb their parents. Let not 
the suggestion be made that this habit is due to any 
laziness or to any incompetence on the part of the 
parents — or let the suggestion be silenced for the 
present. The simple explanation is that, let the 
parents be never so perfectly equipped by disposition 
and by ability for the care of their children, they 
cannot do two things at once, they cannot be in two 
places at the same time. Sometimes indeed they try 
to achieve what cannot be accomplished; sometimes 
they are driven upon a sorry and difficult compromise ; 
but for the most part persons who can afford to hire 
the services of nurses and governesses for their children 
engage these services because, if they attempted to 
render them themselves, they would be cut off from 
the possibility of fulfilling other claims which are 
made upon their time and their strength. It is of 
course the woman, the wife and the mother, who is 
mainly concerned with this problem. Nature and 
custom both grant to the man, the husband, the 
father, a large though not a complete emancipation 
from its dominion, at any rate during the early years 
of the children's life. What are the rival claims which 
call the woman from constant attendance on her child 
or her children? They are the claims of society, the 
claims of that community of which she and her child 



32 AGENTS AND PROCESSES [cH. 

are members, but not the only members. And she 
can only do the best for her child if she also obeys its 
commands. 

Here is a problem which has in it the elements of 
tragedy. For, if society issues its commands so does 
the child, so do the children. Both are authorities to 
be obeyed; but obedience is not easy, since the com- 
mands which each issues often are or seem to be 
opposed to those issued by the other. Society, the 
community, is a circle with a wide circumference, 
some parts of which may be faintly and indistinctly 
drawn, a circumference which may widen, and must 
naturally widen for persons who themselves continue 
to grow: a circumference, however, which along 
certain parts of its edge hardens, so that it becomes 
a barrier, an obstacle to growth. Within this wide 
and irregular circumference smaller circles may be 
traced. The clearest boundary outlines the family 
itself. The claims of the family and those of the 
individual members of it should not be irreconcilable ; 
but it is certain that they are hard to reconcile. A 
child is born into the little world of his family; if he 
claims and wins the undivided attention of his mother, 
as he may naturally claim it and is likely enough to 
win it, he will destroy the group of which he was born 
to be a member. For his mother owes duties and must 
discharge the obligations of allegiance not only to the 
new but also to the older members of her family. 
A man who gains the presence of a child in his house, 
but loses the companionship of his wife, may find that 
his pride in being a father is dearly purchased by his 



Ill] AGENTS AND PROCESSES 33 

loneliness as a husband. The doubtful eyes with 
which elder children look upon a new-comer reflect 
the questioning which disturbs their heart. The circle 
is enlarged; but what if its comfortable and familiar 
circumference has been broken past mending? Parents 
themselves may look wistfully and half-guiltily at 
their elder children to whom they must give less of 
their time and their company, though not less of their 
love, because some of the time (which cannot be 
lengthened) and some of their company (which is 
measured, not perfectly, but still with a rough ac- 
curacy by the time at their disposal) must hence- 
forward be given to an infant whose rights, whatever 
else they may be, have not become prescriptive. And, 
once more, it cannot be forgotten that not only the 
nurture and rearing of children when they are born 
cost time and energy, which are two names for life 
itself, but the making and bearing of children involve 
a charge upon the same fund. 

Now all these claims are claims of the family as it 
is, and as it grows; and they are hard to square with 
the claims of its several members. The present has 
a rival in the past, and is itself rivalled by the future. 
How are these rival claims to be met? The progress 
of human society from its earliest forms has provided 
examples which may be used. Parents must provide 
themselves and their children with food and shelter 
and clothing ; but they no longer provide these things 
by the effort of their own hands. They know where 
to go to buy food; the house in which they live has 
been built not by them; the clothes they wear and 



34 AGENTS AND PROCESSES [ch. 

which they give to their children have been made or 
the materials of which they consist have been pre- 
pared by other people. The parents still provide 
themselves and their children with all these necessary 
things ; but, on the whole, they provide better because 
they call to their assistance other people among whom 
these several services of the purveyor of food, of the 
builder, and of the clothier have been distributed. 
To each of those persons the parents are debtors, they 
are under an obligation, which is represented but not 
discharged by the payment of money. Directly or 
indirectly in return for what is done for them they 
must do what they can for other people. They are 
not set free from this obligation by the fact of being 
parents ; on the contrary, it is because they are parents 
that they are forced into a more frequent commerce 
with the larger world which surrounds the family. 
Accordingly it may well appear that, the stronger and 
the more numerous the claims of the family, the less 
opportunity will there be for the parents and in 
especial for the mother to give themselves imme- 
diately to their family. Then they must find and 
avail themselves of the services of agents who will do 
for them what they cannot be present to do them- 
selves for their children. They cannot take care of 
their children themselves; they must then put their 
children in the care of other people. 

How early this transference of children from their 
mothers' hands to the hands of other persons should 
be made is a question which might be debated did not 
practical necessities give it for the majority of people 



Ill] AGENTS AND PROCESSES 35 

a quick and definite answer. The children will be 
sent to places where they can be minded as soon as 
their legs can carry them, as soon as they can find 
their way. For the majority the infant school or the 
infants' department of a school is the place, and to 
it the children are admitted at four or five or six years 
of age. Already, indeed, some provision has been 
made for the care of children even younger, and no 
doubt ampler and more general provision will pre- 
sently be made for children who cannot take them- 
selves to school. But the reason for their being sent 
away is the same, whether they go at three years or 
at six years of age. Men and women must needs beget 
and bear their children for themselves; for a short 
time the children cannot be and therefore are not 
separated from their mothers; for a short time their 
mothers are precluded from other occupation; but it 
is a short time, and then other occupations claim 
them again, and the children go. They go into the 
hands of the caretakers. 

For whom, it must now be asked, do these care- 
takers act? Whom do they represent? It is con- 
venient at this stage of our argument to use the title 
of caretakers rather than that of teachers, though we 
shall soon find it necessary to adopt the more familiar 
word, without, however, losing what is implied in the 
word which for the present we prefer. Surely, it may 
be answered, it is the parents who are represented by 
these persons, and for the parents that they act. This 
is the truth, but it is very far from being the whole 
truth. We are not here attempting to draw an ideal 



36 AGENTS AND PROCESSES [ch. 

arrangement or to sketch a theory; we are attempting 
to set down very simply and plainly some facts so 
simple and plain that they are rarely named and 
probably very rarely noted. The caretakers, the 
minders of children, act, not only for the parents, 
but for the general society of which parents and 
children and caretakers themselves are members. 
Custom and law sustain the theory that the children 
are not the children of their parents only, but the 
children of society. The parents find it convenient 
or necessary to put their children into the hands of 
caretakers; but custom and law will not have it other- 
wise, and custom and law speak with the voice and 
with the authority of society. An apparent, but not 
real, exception is to be remarked in the practice of 
the rich or the well-to-do people, who do not make 
use of the minding-places and profit by the services 
of the caretakers provided and employed by society. 
For all alike, rich and poor, sooner or later, and the 
rich on the whole sooner and more completely, hand 
over their children to other people. 

At this point, however, it is worth while to remark 
an exception real and not always apparent. The rich 
or well-to-do parents can send away their young 
children to another part of their own house from that 
in which they spend most of their own days and 
nights. Presently, to be sure, they will send them to 
boarding-schools, but we have now in mind an earlier 
stage, when their children can be under the same roof 
and yet not in the way; and under the parents' roof 
they are in the hands of caretakers who are their 



Ill] AGENTS AND PROCESSES 37 

parents' servants, nurses, governesses, selected, em- 
ployed, paid, and, if necessary, dismissed by the 
parents. Here, too, it may be said that the children 
are the children not only of the parents but also of 
society; but society seems to be more remote and 
less powerful, the parents nearer and more dominant. 
An Englishman's home is his Castle ; an Englishman's 
wife can choose her own nurse and governess, if she 
has the money: we shall later enquire into the reasons 
which guide her choice. 

We are now concerned, not with the rich who are 
few, but with the multitude who are not rich. They 
do not select the caretakers for their children, except 
in so far as being electors they may have a share in 
the appointment of persons who undertake a public 
service; the places in which their children are cared 
for are separate and remote from their homes, and 
differ from their homes in a hundred characteristics, 
and not least in the characteristic of being public 
and not private; what goes on in these places, the 
kind of care bestowed upon their children, the forms 
which that care takes, they have very little power to 
control or to direct ; and the companions which their 
children find there are not of the parents' choice, 
though the parents may have no dislike or disapproval 
for them. We are not here comparing the provision 
which the rich make for their own children, with 
that which the community or society makes for the 
children of the majority, with the intention of show- 
ing that one is better or worse than the other; and 
for the moment the main or the only reason for such 



38 AGENTS AND PROCESSES [ch. hi 

comparison in points of mere fact as we have made 
is to bring into distinct view the general nature of this 
provision. Rich and poor ahke, and society as a whole, 
make through their agents provision for taking care 
of their children. Taking care, as we shall see, is a 
comprehensive title for all the processes of education. 
And this provision for the children is made as well 
on behalf of the parents and of the children as for 
the benefit of society itself. 



CHAPTER IV 
NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 

WE may now look more closely at this provision 
and see of what it is made up. When the 
children begin to go to school they can already walk 
and talk. They walk with tottering and uncertain 
step, they talk with a lisping and uncertain voice. 
They have the experience, the ignorance, the powers 
and the weaknesses of children of that age. Now care 
has a negative and a positive sense. Care must be 
taken of children lest they fall into danger and dis- 
aster, and do mischief and injury to themselves and 
to other persons. Young children have a superfluity 
of naughtiness which those who mind them need 
(though they do not always possess) a superfluity of 
energy to control and to convert into a fund of useful 
and beneficent strength. For this reason it is a happy 
necessity by which the earliest and most exacting 
processes of caretaking are entrusted to women. 

It is not the whole business of the caretaker or 
guardian to say "no" to every desire and impulse of 
his wards, though it is a real and important part from 
which he must not be turned aside by the easy 
seductions of theorists who would have him believe 
that children must have their own way, and that the 
office of the teacher is that of a pious onlooker. His 
task is rather that divine labour of preventing them 
in all their ways, of anticipating them by a fine 



40 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

instinct sharpened by the practice of accurate obser- 
vation and tempered by a philosophy both strict 
and generous. He must be beforehand with them, 
not so as to take from them the zestful deHght of 
discovery, but so as to be ready both to interpose 
firmly between them and mistakes which would be 
too costly to themselves and to the world, and also 
to stimulate healthy curiosity and to direct move- 
ment. It is also his business to foresee the oncoming 
of fatigue, not to stop activity before fatigue has 
arrived, but to stop or divert it before it has ad- 
vanced too far. He must take care, in fact ; he must 
be a guardian, nicely estimating the resources of 
his wards and economically controlling the expendi- 
ture of them. He must patiently, but also quickly, 
learn their disposition and nature, so as to interpret 
them to his wards in activities which are none the 
less appropriate, natural, and free because they are 
often suggested by him. He must know what they 
want, and must know when to teU them what they 
want and when to let them find out what they want 
for themselves. But, if he is to know what they 
want, he must once more "prevent" them; he must 
know what they want before they want it. 

We have already called this a "divine" office. If 
the objection be at once raised that it is then not an 
office which any human creature can serve, we should 
reply that it is better to have a high conception of 
guardianship and to admit, when every effort has 
been made to overtake its demands, that it still 
exceeds our powers,^than to have a complete but 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 41 

petty definition, in which perfection and pride can 
achieve a sorry success. For it is by stretching out 
after a remote and lofty ideal that the guardian 
exercises and augments his own powers, and in that 
splendid gap between what he can do and what he 
cannot he leaves room both for the growth of his 
ward and for the advent of God. 

In that uncharted but not unguessed region his 
pupil and God may meet. When that encounter has 
been made the pupil feels the shock at once of dis- 
covery and of recognition. He learns that this new 
presence is indeed familiar. The guardian cannot 
divest himself of responsibility; it is the responsibility 
of an agent, of one who acts for another; and re- 
sponsibility is the pledge and token of authority. If 
the language which has here been used is to be aban- 
doned, if where an earlier generation was content to 
say God, moderns must use some periphrasis, they 
may tax their ingenuity to find one that will suit 
their taste. But they cannot escape the logical force 
of the theory of education which is contained in the 
language of the collects, "that we may obtain that 
which thou dost promise, make us to love that which 
thou dost command," or "that they may obtain their 
petition make them to ask such things as shall please 
thee." To harmonise love with command, freedom with 
inexorable but welcomed necessity, is the business of 
the guardian or the educator; and it is not matter for 
marvel if he has not yet found a solution of a problem 
\ in which the infinite is involved and been able to state 
it in the language of a prospectus^ or a cookery-book. 



42 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

The guardian must suggest exercises for the activity 
of his pupils. They are domesticated, not wild 
animals. Man, who has tamed the beasts of the field, 
has put a yoke upon himself. He has brought them 
into captivity and has put a fence round himself and 
his kindred. The limitations which he imposes on 
himself are necessary for his self-conquest and his 
re-conquest of the world, which was not really his 
own when (in an imaginary age) he was free to roam 
in it at large. But just as the horse, now the servant of 
man, must not only be stabled and fed but exercised, 
so man, now the master of himself, and intending to 
be the master of his children in the hope that they 
one day will acquire self-mastery, must not only be 
housed and fed but exercised also. The analogy may 
be pursued. It may be said that the best exercise is 
work: let the horse be ridden or driven upon some 
errand which must be done, and he will get his 
exercise in the journey which has to be taken. But 
suppose there is no errand to be done, no journey to 
be taken. He cannot be kept very long in his stable ; 
he must be taken out and exercised, for the sake of 
being exercised. Otherwise, if his rest in the stable 
be long, he will be clumsy and fidgety when he begins 
to work again ; and, if the rest be prolonged beyond 
a very limited period, he will become diseased and 
incapable either of the exercise which work provides, 
or of the exercise which takes the place of work. And 
it may properly be said that before he can take 
exercise or do work he must first of all be broken in. 
The aptness and the unsuitability of the analogy are 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 43 

both useful for our argument. We may admit very 
readily that no fair and complete parallel can be 
drawn between man and the other animals; yet it 
would be folly to throw away such information about 
man as may be derived from our knowledge of animals, 
and, still worse, to shut our ears to the suggestions 
which that knowledge affords. 

Most Englishmen are unacquainted with wild 
animals; they know at best creatures round which 
a ring of human civilisation has been drawn, and 
whose ancient rights and liberties of the forest and 
the pasture have long been narrowly confined. Yet 
from such information as we can get from observing 
animals wholly and animals only partially subject to 
man, and from comparing them with ourselves, some 
valuable conclusions may be drawn. In the first place, 
it must be noticed that the creatures which are free 
are free to suffer disaster, damage and death, and that 
those which have lost their freedom are carefully pre- 
served against damage and disaster, and, if not from 
death, at any rate from many of the fiercer pains of 
death. A sheep or an ox which is kept in safety — ^to 
fall at last to the butcher — is kept in safety from the 
wolf and the tiger. The horse is trained for work and 
kept in condition to do his work. For themselves men 
have secured some measure of safety and prescribed 
a training for work. The concerted labours of men 
have had the effect of making every individual in a 
community sure of his food — not yet good and suffi- 
cient for a really vigorous life for every one, yet good 
enough and sufficient to maintain life. Or, if there 



44 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

are exceptions, as indeed some are reported from time 
to time, the rarity accentuates the horror of them. 
Let us repeat that we know Httle of wild animals; let 
us remind ourselves that of primitive or natural or 
wild man we know probably less : he is a creature of 
the constructive and the analjrtical imagination. 

With these provisos, we may now agree that the 
vigilance and the energy which wild animals and 
primitive men needed to exert in order to maintain 
life, domesticated animals and men as we know them 
do not now need to exert. Two results probably follow ; 
first, some of the energy, some of the vigilance, a kind 
of brutal cunning, not being needed, cease to exist; 
but second, a part of the energy and a part of the 
vigilance which were once needed for mere self-pre- 
servation are now released, and may be directed into 
other channels. They have become, as it were, a 
capital, the interest of which may be expended in new 
modes of activity — indeed, the capital itself may be 
invested in new ventures. 

For the lower animals, it has been contended, the 
stages of life which precede maturity are stages in 
which they practise themselves in the exercises which 
they will have to fulfil when maturity is reached. 
These exercises are called, by an analogy which is 
sometimes illuminating and sometimes quite seriously 
misleading, play. Let us grant that a colt when it 
jumps and runs "in play" is preparing itself for 
jumping and running which will be necessary for it 
when it is pursued by a swift and dangerous enemy. 
It is strengthening the muscles, developing the agility. 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 45 

storing up the power of endurance which one day 
may be needed for saving its life. And again the 
sportive movements of the young animal may prepare 
it for the functions to be exercised, at a later time, 
of reproduction. But two comments have to be made, 
two cautions noted. The word preparatory is rightly 
used if it indicates that these activities do in fact 
make the young animal fit and ready for other activi- 
ties in which it will presently engage ; it is not rightly 
used if it suggests that either the young creature itself 
or its parents are of set purpose preparing it for 
functions which they anticipate, and for which these 
activities are seen and foreseen to be introductory. 
And, further, though men who do anticipate what is 
to come and forecast what they desire may make use 
of these early activities and turn them to account, it 
must be noted that, if they profit by the strength 
and the agility, let us say, of the horse, they employ 
that strength and that agility for purposes human 
and not equine. The movements of a saddle-horse or 
a draught-horse are in one sense prepared for by the 
gambols of the colt in the paddock, but they are not 
the same movements as those of the colt. On the 
contrary, the colt is taught not to do in the service of 
man what he did in his infantile freedom. The colt is 
broken in and he is trained to do what without training 
he would not do. A second nature is imposed upon 
him, but it is not horse-nature pure and simple, nor 
horse-nature matured; it is horse-nature instructed 
and diverted to unhorselike ends by man who uses 
the horse for his own purposes. 



46 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

Now the early, extravagant, varied activities of 
childhood are said to be preparatory to the engage- 
ments and tasks of mature human life. The apparent 
purposelessness of them has persuaded some observers 
to call them play; the usefulness of them, in fostering 
strength and producing agility or dexterity or ver- 
satility has led the same observers very rightly to set 
a high value upon them ; and when the observers are 
concerned with education they very naturally go on 
to argue that the spontaneous, unpremeditated ac- 
tivities of children should be very carefully noted, 
and that they suggest the proper modes of develop- 
ment, the easiest and safest avenues towards mature 
efficiency. It is the business of the educator, they say, 
to watch these activities with a constant, affectionate 
scrutiny and to follow the lines which they mark out, 
hastening but not hurrying progress along channels 
which are shown to be natural. 

This is excellent advice, if it is balanced by con- 
siderations at which we have hinted and must now 
clearly state. First, we must recall once again the 
fact that the human creature is domesticated, not 
wild (or, as some prefer to say, using a difficult and 
dangerous word, natural). And consequently on the 
one hand his earliest activities are already fenced 
round by limiting conventions; he is not free to play 
with the fire or drown himself in the brook or to 
destroy property; his inclination to do these things 
is curbed ; and, on the other hand, the safety which 
is won for him by the precaution of his elders gives 
him a margin, a capital of energy, which the wild 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 47 

animal or the savage cannot store up, since he is 
called upon from time to time to run for his life and 
to fight for his life. The domesticated animal has the 
leisure of the stable, where he would eat his head off 
if he were not exercised. The child has the security of 
home, in which he becomes rich and over-rich unless 
he is taken out to spend in exercise his stored energies, 
A comparison between children who are well cared 
for and those who are ill cared for makes this point 
clearer. The children who live upon the streets and 
have early depended upon their wits acquire a sharp- 
ness, a quickness which children of the same age 
whose lives are guarded and sheltered do not always 
possess or exhibit ; but they are living on capital, and 
their active but impoverished bodies are but too often 
representative of their eager but ill-nourished natures. 
But the cared-for children may grow fat in mind and 
gross in body, if the care which surrounds them is 
merely protective ; it is good for them to be shielded 
from danger, But not too much shielded; it is good 
for them to store energy, but energy stored is energy 
only potentially useful ; it must be spent and used — 
The question is how? 

It is not unnecessary at the present moment to 
remark that the question cannot be answered by the 
children themselves. It must be answered for them, 
on their behalf, by older persons, their parents and 
guardians, by society which uses parents and guar- 
dians as its agents. These agents certainly will take 
into consideration the nature of the children with 
whom they are dealing; but it is not that alone which 



48 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

they will take into consideration. They will consider 
and try to estimate the strength, the character, the 
possibilities, and promises of their wards; but they 
will not forget that it is in the world that they will 
have to live, and that they must be prepared to live 
in it. Wishes, clearly formed and articulately ex- 
pressed, children cannot present for the guidance of 
their elders, who will not be unaware that clearly 
formed and articulately expressed wishes upon so vast 
and vague a matter as their own destiny are rarely 
presented even by grown people who have had ex- 
perience of the world and practice in discovering and 
formulating their own desires. The elders will not, 
for that matter, be unaware that when grown-up 
people have framed and had the courage to express 
their wishes in regard to what they themselves should 
be, or have, or do, the world is rarely willing to grant 
those wishes exactly and fully. Something may be 
known and much may yet be learnt about the instincts 
of children, their habits may be even niore thoroughly 
investigated and recorded than theyhave yet been, and 
their guardians may in the light of this information 
be able to prescribe for them courses of training more 
likely to be fruitful and beneficent than those which 
might have been prescribed by other authorities who 
lacked the patience and the insight for making these 
enquiries or never dreamed that they should be made. 
No small or unimportant part of this information 
has been gathered by students who have made the 
play of children the subject of their sometimes too 
laborious research. Certainly the teachers and guar- 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 49 

dians of children are wise if they try to discover what 
play is and carefully note and examine the forms 
which play takes. They cannot be mistaken when 
they inform us that in the activities of play young 
animals and children practise and perfect in advance 
activities which in later life they will need for self- 
preservation; they cannot be wrong when they bid 
us forecast what will one day be necessary from what 
is to-day the sportive occupation of rich or reckless 
leisure. But they must be willing to take into account 
and estimate with impartial justice all the evidence 
which they collect, or which can be supplied to 
them by unlearned but intelligent nursemaids, elder 
brothers and sisters, and even by parents themselves. 
They must note that play has its times and seasons, 
some forms of play are put aside and others take 
their place, and yet others succeed in due season; 
they must not claim for childhood on a whole — which 
spreads over many rapidly changing stages — a form 
or some forms which may be appropriate and natural 
to one or some stages of that vague and elastic period. 
They must be careful not to stereotype and fix what 
is in its origin spontaneous and in its essence fluid and 
variable, unless they do so deliberately and of set 
purpose. They must not make their wards play; 
though they may make their wards repeat consciously 
what they have previously begun to do without 
knowing what they did; they may cause them to 
repeat with greater exactitude what earlier and left to 
themselves their wards repeated with variations. But 
when they have introduced this necessity, this con- 



50 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

sciousness, this fixity, they must note that they have 
exchanged play for work — pleasant work, perhaps; 
but work, and not always pleasant. They must remark 
not less the conservatism of children than their readi- 
ness for change and innovation ; they may ring changes 
upon games, and may very rightly do this ; but when 
they have suggested changes and enforced them by 
authority with a didactic purpose, excellent as that 
purpose may be and necessary as it may well be 
proved, again they have substituted for play work — 
pleasant work, perhaps; but work, we repeat, and not 
always pleasant. 

No greater cruelty could be practised upon children 
than that which is advocated by some writers of 
letting their play provide the map, and mark out the 
lines of their training. Much, very much may be 
learnt from a careful (and playful) observation of 
children's play; but there is no escape from the fact 
that, if grown-up people are to concern themselves 
at all with children, they must concern themselves 
in the way of interference. Responsible for bringing 
them into existence, their elders are responsible also 
for maintaining them and fitting them to maintain 
themselves. The ministrations which a cat bestows 
upon her kittens have the effect (and we may, without 
much risk of being misunderstood, add, the intention) 
of promoting their passage from kittenhood to the 
condition of mature cats ; they have not the effect of 
continuing for them an eternal immaturity. And if 
the cat suffers the play of her offspring with ex- 
emplary, maternal patience, there are limits to her 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 51 

endurance : and some forms of their play she will not 
endure, but summarily check and punish. In particular 
she will check and punish those forms of play which 
endanger the lives of her offspring and her own life. 

We have so far used the word play, as indeed it 
is often used, as if it had the same meaning for the 
lower animals and for children, and again as if it was 
essentially of the same kind for very young infants 
and for children who have passed infancy. But though 
this use is common we shall have to show that it 
stands in need of correction. 

For the present, however, we must leave the pro- 
blem, and briefly summarise the arguments of the 
preceding pages. It is clear that children need care, 
that the care which they need cannot, after very 
early infancy, be provided for them directly by their 
own parents; that the services of other persons are 
accordingly called for; that the care which these 
persons exercise is partly negative — keeping children 
out of harm which they might do to themselves or 
receive from the world, keeping them also from doing 
injury to other persons. Children must live and let 
live, and for both purposes a negative care is needed. 
But they need a positive care also, a care which is 
directed to increasing their chances of living, to pre- 
paring them for living in the world. If it is said that 
already they are living in the world, the whole 
problem of education has been briefly and enigmati- 
cally stated in those very words. They are living in 
the world and care is exercised over them to ensure 
their living more fully and better, that is to say, living 



52 NATURE AND DISCIPLINE [ch. 

otherwise than they now Uve. The purpose of educa- 
tion is to make a difference, and, though the difference 
may be decided in consideration of the general apti- 
tude of children and the special aptitudes of the 
special children with whom any particular caretaker 
or group of caretakers is concerned, it is not decided 
by the children themselves ; it is decided for them. It 
is not decided even by the caretakers themselves, 
except in so far as they are agents for the parents, 
for the family, for society at large. In their turn, 
when they have grown up, and already by the subtle, 
delicate and imperious demands of their own nature 
(interpreted for them by their elders), the children 
make and wUl make decisions for the world; they 
will make and already make a difference to it; but 
the active, overt decisions are not now made by them, 
but on their behalf and not less, but more, on behalf 
of the world or society itself. 

Is it possible to find a word which will conveniently 
describe the object of these decisions, a word or a 
sentence? Perhaps the widest and at the same time 
the most accurate word is "conversation." Children 
must learn the speech of the world, to hear and under- 
stand it, to reply to it; to make advances and to 
receive answers ; to move in the world. At once a 
very remarkable difference makes itself seen between 
children and grown-up persons. For children the 
whole world is open in a sense in which it is not open 
to their elders. Their elders have received a bias, 
taken a direction, set out upon a course which with 
little variation they must pursue. The world is open 



IV] NATURE AND DISCIPLINE 53 

to' children because neither they nor their guardians 
know what course they will take; to the east they 
may go or to the west. " As the twig is bent the tree's 
inclined." Before the twig is bent, one may say that 
it can be bent in any direction; but this wide and 
universal choice is only possible before any decision 
has been made, and while ignorance invests the future 
with a rich uncertainty. Some one direction they 
must take, some course they must pursue; and t 
choose one is to reject other courses, or at best to make 
others subsidiary and subordinate: into tempting 
fields they may make rare excursions, when the main 
road is for a time left. To the main road they must 
sooner or later return. They cannot travel both east- 
wards and westwards. Let it be noted that even an 
eccentric person has his own main road; he follows 
his own devious course and consistently shocks more 
ordinary people by his habitual differences from them. 

But before the traveller can venture upon any path 
he must have some preparation, for in any path he 
will be engaged in "conversation" — in dealing with 
the world — that part of the world which he will meet 
upon it — those other parts of the world which he will 
encounter when paths which he does not himself 
pursue cut across his own. Some travelling com- 
panions he will have, and at halting places, inns and 
markets he must needs traffic with other folk. 

Parents then, and society, which is the general 
parent, bid the caretakers or teachers equip their 
charges with whatever they will need, not for com- 
pleting their journey but for setting out upon it. 



CHAPTER V 
CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 

SPEECH is the key by which we unlock our own 
minds and make an entrance into the minds of 
our neighbours. But it is a key which they must have 
the right to use as well as we ourselves. This image 
may serve us for a time ; we shall presently note the 
limits of its usefulness. 

We are stUl concerned with matters of fact, with 
what people do, and though, as we have already 
shown, it is not possible to divorce practice from 
theory, we shall try now to set practice first and to 
arrive at theory when we are forced to read it under 
pressure of facts of common usage. 

We suppose it is true of most children that their 
earliest speech is learnt from their mothers. Let us 
suppose that this early speech includes simple sen- 
tences in which the most elementary experiences are 
simply described. The children are hungry, or thirsty, 
and they learn to announce these facts to their 
mothers. They desire to go here or there, to take 
possession of this or that thing, and they can say as 
much. They can understand something of what is 
meant by people who have a larger use of language 
than they themselves have acquired. It is as much 
as this, but not much more than this that children 
have for speech when, be their parents rich or poor, 
they are handed over to persons other than their 



CH.v] CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 55 

parents, for that preparation which, it is agreed, they 
will need for life. The rich and the well-to-do hand 
over their children to the care of nurses or governesses 
who live under the parental roof: the poor or the 
less well-to-do send their children to schools. If the 
general purpose of education is to enable us to have 
conversation with the world, the first and the chief 
purpose is to enable us to have speech with the world. 
Now there can be no speech without subjects for 
speech. If children are to talk, they must talk about 
something or things. In teaching children to speak 
we are engaged partly in selecting for them the sub- 
jects of discourse, and partly in providing them with 
language for subjects which they themselves choose 
or which the world forces upon them. And in learning 
to speak they learn to discover and to express the 
relation in which they stand to the world as it con- 
fronts them. The world indeed confronts them, but 
just as at the earliest stage of their life the world is 
completely represented to them by their mothers,that 
is to say, that of the world they see and hear nothing 
but their mothers, who are for them the world, so 
now the world is represented, not completely but 
largely, by their teachers. It is as if between the eyes 
of the child and the world the teacher was held up 
or posed. That figure blocks the view and also is the 
view, except for a margin happily left over. Beyond 
the edge, as we may say, of the teacher, the world 
makes itself seen and felt. But, to begin with, the 
teacher bulks large, and the world is an inconsiderable 
fringe or frame in which the teacher is set. 



56 CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD [ch. 

Later, when the eyes of the pupils have learnt to 
range more widely, the fringe or frame increases in 
magnitude, and the teacher relatively decreases. Or 
we may say that the teacher who stood between the 
pupils and the world becomes transparent, the pupils 
learn to "see through him," whether because he has 
proved himself a fraud or because he has proved himself 
a wise and trustworthy guide. Transparent, we have 
called him ; but colourless he cannot be, unless he will 
be savourless as well; and if he is savourless, he is 
useless. But it is not his business to be transparent 
at first; he must very literally stand between his 
pupils and the world, which is as much as to say that, 
again at first and to begin with, he must be to his 
pupils the world itself. 

The nature of our problem forces us to correct 
every sentence we write upon it. The teacher must 
be the world to his pupils, but with certain reserva- 
tions and upon certain conditions. He must, of course, 
remember what we have already noted, that he does 
not completely, though he may and must largely 
block out the large and general world from the view 
of his pupils in the earliest stages of his dealings with 
them. He must not forget that though, during the 
time when his pupils are with him, his part is so large 
as almost to fill the stage, there is a remainder, 
longer or shorter, of time when he disappears, if not 
from the memory yet from the sight of his pupils, 
and the stage which he occupies is taken by the 
parents of his pupils. It may well be that when the 
teacher is present, the parents are remembered, and 



V] CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 57 

that when the parents are present the teacher is 
remembered. It may be that the pupils would, if 
they could, reject the image that we have used. They 
might rather be inclined to describe their experience, 
not as that of spectators who look first at one and 
then at another actor upon the same stage, but rather 
as that of persons who attend now one and now 
another theatre — the theatre of school, and that 
other theatre of home. In fact we know that, what- 
ever their experience may be, young children at any 
rate will not give in set words either of these accounts. 
It is older people who, looking back upon their child- 
hood and youth, interpret them by the help of these 
images, which may but roughly and most imperfectly 
represent what actually befell them in those distant 
days; and their interpretation of their own childhood 
and youth throws an uncertain and fitful light upon 
the experiences of those who are now young. 

Yet we may say that the advance from infancy to 
childhood and youth is one in which the mind en- 
counters more and more things for which words 
become necessary, and more and more words which 
need explanation. There is the stage, or there are 
the theatres. At first there is one actor, the mother; 
presently there are several; at first the actor needs 
no language, but makes herself understood, so far as 
it is necessary for the child to understand her, by 
doing things, and making sounds which need not 
even for her be words and for her listener are certainly 
less than words. Presently words come to play a part, 
or to be instruments in the use of this actor. They 



S8 CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD [ch. 

serve to make clear and clearer things which had 
indeed been known, but less well known without the 
use of words. But with the increase of words, there 
is an increase of things or people, to be seen and 
heard, to whom gradually and perhaps quickly words 
or names are attached. If we speak of an actor and 
even call the mother an actor, it must be at first in 
a very literal sense ; she is the person who does things. 
Yet in the earliest stages of life this actor is not 
differentiated for the child from himself. She, to be 
sure, in acting for him must sever herself, in imagina- 
tion, in understanding, and even in physical difference 
from him ; but for him she is not at first an actor even 
in this sense. She is not so much one who acts for 
him as one who acts with him. Or we say, perhaps, 
more accurately that there is a unity in which the 
action of each and the corresponding, balancing, action 
of the other are the conditions of a common life. 
Where there is perfect consonance, there is no need for 
words, and silence enshrines a complete harmony. 

This harmony is disturbed, this consonance broken 
by a necessity in the life both of the mother and 
of the child. It is the necessity of growth. And 
growth is extension beyond the confines of an en- 
vironment congenial and perfectly adapted to the 
growing creature into an environment which is not, 
though it may become, congenial and even perfectly 
adapted. Conversation means turning round in the 
world, presenting a fresh face to its new and var3dng 
aspects, making a home of it, turning its unfamiliarity 
into conditions of use. But if growth is a law of life. 



v] CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 59 

or, to put it more simply, if living creatures cannot 
help groAving, then the fact of growth involves the 
necessity of exploration, extension into an ever en- 
larging world. But the world itself grows beneath 
eyes which learn to see more of it and more in it. 
And, though this twofold process of learning, the 
extensive and the intensive, is better described by 
the general word conversation than by the word 
speech, there can be no question that the process is 
aided by and in part identical with the acquisition of 
a speech which becomes continually wider in its range, 
and more exact in its significance. We may put into 
the mouth of children two questions : they ask in fact, 
though not always and not at first in express language, 
" What is this new thing with which, as it seems, I am 
now brought into touch? " They ask also "What is 
this, apparently, familiar thing, with which I am now 
brought into a new and strange relationship? " Both 
questions are provoked by a sense of discomfort. And 
the discomfort will continue until the new thing or 
the new relationship is adjusted to the sum of old 
things, or to the sum of familiar relationships. The 
world is being enlarged for the child from day to day 
by fresh additions which must be absorbed and fitted 
into the experiences previously gathered. 

It is also being broken up into new divisions as the 
eyes which behold it become more critical. The pro- 
cess of addition and that of analysis would be merely 
confusing if they were not and so far as they are not 
accompanied or immediately followed by a process 
of reconstruction or redintegration. Now the double 



6o CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD [ch. 

operation of analysis and synthesis which the mind 
directs upon the world is a process which it directs at 
the same time upon itself. "There is, then, in psycho- 
logy as in biology, what may be called a principle 
of 'progressive' differentiation or specialisation^." 
But this differentiation, this specialisation within the 
mind must be like those processes which the world 
accepts from the mind; we almost may go so far as 
to say that they are identical. The mind becoming 
aware of new things in the world, and new relation- 
ships which it must hold to things long familiar, 
becomes at the same time aware of new elements in 
itself, of new aspects or powers. Now newness is 
strangeness and strangeness is awkwardness, and 
awkwardness is the enemy of conversation. The mind 
which is to be at home in the world is a mind which 
must be at one with itself. If it is to have speech 
with the world it must have speech with itself. 

We now reach a critical stage in the caretaker's or 
teacher's duty. Earlier it was his duty to stand 
between the world and his pupil; now it is his duty 
to introduce his pupil to the world and to bring the 
world to his pupil. When the mother, the nurse, the 
governess more or less completely blocked the vision 
of the child, yet beyond the margin of these persons' 
influence the world loomed upon the untrained eye, 
and shone with so bright a light as to make them in 
a measure luminous: now, conversely, when it is 
their business to bring the pupils into relation with 
the world, they cannot do away with themselves, 

1 Cf. Ward, Psychological Principles, p. 50. 



V] CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 6i 

their personality must be taken into account, their 
quahty and character cannot but give colour to the 
world of which they are the interpreters. Let it be 
granted at once that the professional interpreters are 
not the only interpreters of the world ; yet the fact 
remains that certain persons are specially engaged 
for the task. And they can only interpret so much of 
the world as they know. 

And what is their office? Their business is to 
conduct speech between the world and their pupils; 
the world and the pupils are as it were the principals 
at a conference ; the interpreter must make them in- 
telligible, each party to the other. But here our 
metaphor becomes distractingly interesting. For, first 
of all, if the world and the principals are present, 
nothing can be absent, not even a subject for speech. 
Whatever speech is held must be about the world and 
about the pupils. And secondly, if the world is present, 
the pupils cannot be an addition to the world; more 
than all there cannot be; the pupils therefore must 
be a part of the world. We may add, for the same 
reason, that the interpreters are a part of the same 
world. And lastly, it is now clear that whatever speech 
goes forward is the speech of the world with the world, 
of the pupils with the pupils, of a self with a self. 

If it is argued that such speech as we have described 
is perfect and complete speech and therefore not to 
be compassed by beginners or even by more practised 
speakers in an imperfect world, we shall readily agree. 
Yet this ideal of a perfect and complete speech is of 
value as a standard by which imperfection may be 



/ 



62 CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD [ci^ 

tested and progress recorded. It stands as a warning 
against a very grave danger. The danger is that in 
teaching speech and introducing children by speech 
to the subjects of speech, we may estabhsh in their 
minds a mistake common enough in our own minds 
of figuring the speaker, the hstener, and the matter 
about which they talk as three separate elements, 
each of them outside of the others. This figure it is 
not unnatural for teachers and their pupils to fashion, 
and at an early stage it may represent a part of the 
truth. But the object of speech is to effect a unity 
between speaker, listener and subject, and as soon as 
this unity has been really attained both speaker and 
listener discover that they have not so much made a 
unity as revealed to themselves a unity which already 
existed, but of which they hr i been unaware. The 
world in fact always .embraced speaker, listener and 
subject, and the effect of speech has been to analyse 
an inarticulate unity into its constituent parts, not 
by the severance of part from part, which would bring 
about their destruction, but by a process of intelligent 
and conscious synthesis ; that is, the putting together 
in the mind of elements which were already together, 
though their alliance had not been detected. 

As we have already admitted, to teach children 
(or older persons) to speak is to provide them with the 
subjects of speech. These subjects are a multitude 
which none can number, and such store of them as 
any man can acquire may both perplex and burden 
him, if he regards each one as a fresh and separate 
possession, a monument of his own skill and patience 



V] CON^lpSATION WITH THE WORLD 63 

and resource.^He may acquire subjects as the vulgar 
rich acquire pictures, or chairs or horses or objects 
of art, and discover sooner or kter that he has been 
a fool for his pains, since a nian's life consists not 
in the multitude of the things which he possesses. 
Things, reckoned as possessions, take a quick ven- 
geance upon the man who claims to own them, for 
they take possession of him, and quarrel over their 
distracted and dismembered prey. Things reckoned 
as instruments are no longer mere possessions, they 
have already become parts of life itself; tools of which 
the mastery has been won are like limbs of the body 
or powers of the mind; they have been brought into 
relation with each other by being subordinated, all 
of them to a single, if a many-sided and versatile, 
personality. 

It may indeed be said that possession is only 
justified when the things possessed, whether they 
be material or spiritual, whether they are bricks and 
mortar or knowledge, have ceased to be possessions, 
and have been absorbed in the life and taken their 
place in its general fabric. But, though the statement 
is true and has its use, we have to remember that 
possession in this sense is a high accomplishment 
which a man will have done well if he acquire in the 
course of a long lifetime. And there have never been 
wanting moralists who, realising clearly how much 
possessions may let and hinder men, have advised 
their fellows to get rid of their wealth as quickly as 
possible and to live the simple life. Some of these 
teachers have even been willing to attempt to put 



64 CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD [ch. 

their own doctrine into practice. They deserve our 
praise for their courage and their sincerity; but 
success they cannot have. All great maxims are 
oracular and need interpretation from a casuistry 
which unites reverence with common sense. Those 
are true words which declare that we come naked 
into the world and naked depart from it. But he 
would be a poor commentator who should urge men 
quite literally to accept them. However they go out 
of it, men come into the world to find themselves 
already the heirs of a wealth which they have not 
themselves amassed, though they have yet to learn 
how to use any or all of it. They must set their hands 
upon it piecemeal, taking up this and then that good 
or bad thing which has been bequeathed to them and 
making it in some sort their own. But let us for a 
moment pretend that the great sa5ring justly de- 
scribes men as they are at birth. What is certain is 
that they cannot help acquiring many things, and 
that they must acquire many things in order to make 
the journey, whether it be long or short and with 
whatever fortunes it may be attended, between birth 
and death. If they come with nothing (which is not 
true) and go with nothing (which is most improbable), 
there is no question that between coming and going 
they must have many things. Let us not forget, what 
has already been more than once repeated, that really 
to have, properly to possess, is to have drawn the 
thing "possessed" into life, so that it ceases to be a 
thing and is become a part of him who has it, as in- 
separable from him as his hand, as inalienable from 



v] CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 65 

him as his thought. Let us not forget this, and we 
shall quickly see that before men have learnt properly 
to possess they may be expected improperly, im- 
perfectly to possess. We may have some patience 
with ourselves and with our neighbours if we and 
they learn a hard lesson by many slow and perhaps 
painful stages. We may learn to be very tolerant 
without turning our backs upon our ideal of con- 
versation. 

And we may at this point put to ourselves some 
practical questions. What are the things, the pos- 
sessions, the knowledges, which we believe that every 
human creature ought to acquire, and sooner or later 
to absorb into his being and nature, in order that he 
may deserve the place which by birth he inherits as 
an ordinary citizen or member of the world? And 
again, since every man may be said to belong not 
merely and not so much to the whole world as to 
some special section of it, what are those other things 
which he ought to have in order to deserve and to 
keep his place in that special section? And last, since 
every man is in some sense extra- ordinary, alone in 
the world, alone even in his own section, what are 
the things (we still use that most general word) which 
he ought to have in order to be satisfactory to himself? 
These are hard questions, and a severe condition is 
laid upon those who try to answer them. The con- 
dition is this — the answer to any one of these questions 
must be reconciled with the answer to the others. 
Is a man "alone in the world"? Even his loneliness 
must be a relation in which he stands to it. Is a man 



66 CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD [ch. 

a member of some special group? Then he must 
fulfil his obligations to it without losing his unique 
and individual quality, and without forgetting or 
disclaiming his place in the larger whole? Is he a 
"citizen of the world"? That great title must not 
absolve him from allegiance to his special section of 
the world or from loyalty to his own nature. 

He who is able to harmonise these claims is the 
educated man ; the measure in which any man is able 
to harmonise them is the measure of his education : 
the measure of his failure in any one of them is the 
measure of his failure in all. This is an ancient 
doctrine, but it has not lost its vigour or its value. 
When Plato claimed that the guardian should be a 
man who neither feared death for himself, nor la- 
mented the death of a friend " as if some fearful thing 
had befallen him," he went on to "affirm this too, 
that such an one is pre-eminently sufficing to himself 
in living well, and is least of all men dependent upon 
others^." But the self-sufficing man is no selfish miser 
of a cloistered virtue. He is to be put to many tests 
to prove his fitness to take and fulfil his part in a 
community; he will have learned the justice which 
consists in every man's minding his own business, and 
"being a good guardian of himself and of the music 
which he was taught, and showing himself in all these 
matters to have an orderly and courageous character 
. . .he will be most profitable both to himself and to the 
commonwealth^." 

We have already shown that neither parents on the 

1 Rep. Ill, 387 D, E. 2 Ibid. 413 e. 



V] CONVERSATION WITH THE WORLD 67 

one hand nor the community as a whole on the other 
can shake off their share of responsibility for the pre- 
paration of the young for the life which awaits them : 
yet a special, if a delegated, responsibility rests upon 
the caretakers, as we have called those persons to 
whom parents and community both entrust their 
children. We may now state the nature and the scope 
of this responsibility more exactly. It is the duty of 
these persons to equip their charges with such know- 
ledge and skill and to train them in such abilities and 
aptitudes as will give them the right of entry into 
the large world and the right of re-entry into their 
own spirits. Into the whole of the large world evi- 
dently their pupils cannot enter; but the teachers 
cannot foretell with any certainty along what avenues 
in the world, along which of its beaten tracks, or 
through which of its untried regions they will make 
a way, of their own choice or under the stress of 
necessity or by that combination of forces in which 
their native impulse and the pressure of the world 
unite to carry them along a resultant path. But 
something they do know: they know that wherever 
fortune and force lead their pupils they must hold 
conversation with other human beings and with them- 
selves, and they must help them to take up and carry 
on this conversation. Now there can be no conver- 
sation unless those who are to be parties to it are 
aware of each other, have the means or the instru- 
ments for communication and some matters which 
they can communicate. 



CHAPTER VI 
LIFE AND LANGUAGE 

THE business of the teacher is thus to make his 
pupil aware of the world. If it is said that the 
child is already aware of the world before he comes 
under the direction of a teacher, there is no need 
either to quarrel with the statement or to suppose 
that it removes and cancels the office of the teacher. 
The child has life itself before he comes to any teacher, 
but it is the business of the teacher to see that he 
gets life more abundantly. So it is for the teacher 
both to deepen and to widen his pupils' knowledge 
of the world. And this knowledge is gained by ex- 
change. The word commerce may be used for our 
present purpose. There is a commerce of ideas, as 
well as a commerce of material commodities. To be 
sure, some things are bought without money and 
without price; their value is not to be reckoned in 
any coinage ; but these things are of so vital a necessity 
that they are properly likened to life itself, and we 
may justly say that they are won by exchange; we 
pay with life for what we live on. Yet life is never 
seen ; it escapes detection and definition like the soul ; 
it hides itself behind and reveals itself in things and 
outward activities, and these are named and ex- 
pressed and explained in words. 

If, then, there is to be any conversation between 
the pupil and the world, and if there is to be a growing 



CH.vi] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 69 

conversation, the teacher must help the pupil to 
understand that he has some things about which he 
may talk to the world, with which he may do business 
with the world, and that on the other hand the world 
has things about which he may listen to its speech, 
and which he may acquire in exchange for what he 
has to give. The first task of the teacher therefore, 
when the child is come to the stage at which speech 
begins, is to bring him into acquaintance with those 
things which already he shares with the world, and 
which he will continue to share with it, whatever his 
own special course of development may be. This 
business may be described in other words ; it is the 
work of making the child see and understand that 
the very things about which he is himself most 
intimately and most constantly concerned also in- 
timately and constantly concern the world itself. 

We have used the word "things " and we have used 
the word "activities"; both are necessary for our 
purpose. The child feels and does things; he sees, he 
hears, he tastes, he smells, he touches ; and if we reflect 
upon each one of these feelings we cannot but observe 
that in each or through each either he may receive a 
communication from the world or convey one to it ; 
to look more closely into the problem is indeed to 
remark that he does both of these things at once, he 
both receives and conveys a message. But the message 
of mere sensation and response does not satisfy him; 
he desires about some of his feelings to be more pre- 
cise; not only to have them, but to say what they 
are, and by saying what they are to arrest them and 



70 LIFE AND LANGUAGE [ch. 

to perpetuate them ; he must receive and analyse what 
he receives; he must act and act consciously. But 
when he does all this, when he delays and lingers 
upon his feelings and his activities, he is aware of 
what he is doing; he is seizing with a firm and a 
firmer hand the things which he touched ; he exercises 
each of his senses, not for the sake of exercising it 
[that is, as it were, thrown into the bargain) but in 
order to catch and keep something — ^the scent of a 
flower, the savour of a food, the sound of a voice, the 
form of some object on which his eyes rest. Things he 
makes his own ; he discovers presently that, in captur- 
ing things, he has made two captives besides ; he has 
laid hold of the world and he has laid hold of himself. 
And now he is on the eve of a further and a greater dis- 
covery. These things, real before, become now spiritu- 
ally significant ; they are aspects of himself and of the 
world, modes in which he and the world express their 
life ; and the clearness and fulness of his speech about 
these things gives him knowledge of himself and of 
the world, in which he now consciously lives, but which 
hitherto was only some other, over against himself. 

The subject matter for speech, for the conversation 
held between the individual and the world, is then 
nothing but the individual himself and the world 
itself. The truth is veiled by necessity and by decency. 
It is not good manners to talk about oneself; and it 
is only possible for a philosopher to talk about "the 
self." Common folk talk about you and me, and yet, 
with a certain pleasant reserve, which happily permits 
a fulness and freedom of speech which would else be 



VI] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 71 

unpleasant or beyond compassing. Common folk talk 
about the things which they have in common. And 
the world is populated with common folk, who talk 
about common things, because they have too little 
philosophy and too much propriety to talk overtly 
about themselves or "the self." 

We must, then, assist our pupils to discover and to 
name these common things which they share with the 
rest of the world ; for it is through knowledge of these 
things, or under the semblance of knowledge of these 
things that they will come to know both themselves 
and the world. What are these common things? What 
else, but eating and drinking, and things to eat and 
to drink; clothing and shelter; heat and cold, the 
progress of the seasons, the alternation of day and 
night? What else but the sun seen in the day, the 
moon and the stars by night ; clouds and storms, and 
streams and rivers, making their way from hidden 
springs, from high places in hills and mountains to 
the valleys and the plains and onward to the sea, the 
fishes of the water, the birds of the air, the beasts of 
the field? These are the common things, and men 
move in the midst of them, observing and taking note 
of all, seeking some, escaping from others as well as 
they may, and striving deliberately or learning by 
happy chance and not less by misfortune to adapt 
themselves to these things or to bend them to their 
purpose. 

Upon the earth man moves, surveys it, guesses at 
its hidden treasures, and forces it to release its secrets; 
upon the water he ventures, and loses one land to 



72 LIFE AND LANGUAGE [ch. 

find another ; he meditates flight in the air ; he matches 
his strength against that of the beasts, and, since he 
cannot rival them, he does more, he tames them. He 
encounters his fellows, and establishes customs and 
makes laws, rules of speech and of conduct. Death 
he confronts, and is not daunted. These are the 
common things which every man shares with every 
other; to these the child is introduced when he is 
born; these are forces which smite upon or caress his 
senses, which fill his imagination, from which he 
cannot sever himself, but by which he would be over- 
whelmed if he did not learn speech, the art of arti- 
culate words and co-ordinating thought, the art of 
conversation, of conducting himself in this crowd. 
From the crowd he must disengage himself, if he is 
to learn how much he has in common with it: the 
crowd itself he must sort out and disentangle if he 
is to learn sympathy with the human creatures like 
himself who are part of it: from himself he must 
separate them in order to perceive his oneness with 
them ; and he must separate them also from the scene 
in which they and he move, if he is to perceive at last 
how this creature of the dust, which is man, is by the 
creative power of human imagination, made the maker 
of that from which he springs. These things, and the 
emotions which they stir, the thoughts which they 
prompt are our common inheritance ; to move through 
these things is our curriculum— drawn, not by the pen 
of a schoolmaster, but by that of nature herself. We 
enter upon our inheritance when we enter upon life, 
for life itself is the inheritance. 



VI] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 73 

It is the business of the teacher to assist his pupil 
to make good his title, to make effective his potential 
possession of the world. He can only do his business 
if he remembers that he is himself a part of the world 
with which he desires his pupil to have clear and in- 
telligent conversation, and if he presents himself to 
his pupil as one of the elements of that world, as 
natural as the sun, though less brilliant, as natural 
as a stream, though less limpid, but always natural, 
one of the objects of the child's own natural curiosity. 
The arrival of the schoolmaster should be very quiet 
and unostentatious, or, better still, he should not 
arrive, he should be there and discovered in his setting ; 
and his general setting is the large world in which the 
pupil is himself placed and as by a happy coincidence 
also discovered. It is not for the schoolmaster (or 
other teachers) to interrupt the reverie of the child who 
scans the broad world, and looks into the vast heaven ; 
it is for him to add understanding to inquiry in such 
a sort as forever to widen the range of both. He 
should be the ready and willing victim of questions; 
the source of explanations; he should offer, but not 
too publicly, a hand when his pupil needs help in 
passing over difficult ground. He must have the 
manner of a fellow traveller, whose path has hit upon 
that of his pupU, and he should have this manner, 
not as an accomplishment merely, but also because 
it very exactly represents the fact. Such he should 
appear, because such he should be. He should have 
the manner moreover, of a man who, having fallen 
in with, being overtaken by, or having himself over- 



74 LIFE AND LANGUAGE [ch. 

taken another upon a road or in a path, knows that 
presently his course will carry him away from his 
companion. For the time they are together; the older 
person has moved along this part of the journey 
before, but it remains new to him; he remarks with 
chastened and practised curiosity things which had 
escaped him before, or which are indeed now newly 
to be seen in this road; he recognises what he had 
earlier observed. He answers questions, when he is 
asked; but his main comment is unspoken, though 
not unnoticed by his companion, who has eyes to see 
what this other, this elder, person is doing, and to 
remark what effect the world, this piece of the world, 
has upon him. 

Such speech as they have together will be mainly 
held about the path in which they are moving, or 
about the objects which are near to it. Through the 
great world they are moving, it is true ; but they are 
moving through it because they are moving over 
this part of it and along this particular way. They 
may pause sometimes, silently to contemplate the 
large surrounding territory, to look up into the sky; 
but they must not pause too long. The journey is to 
be made; and why? Because at the end of it, or at 
the end of the stage, both travellers are expected; 
they must not fail those who are looking for them ; 
something they must bring in their hands, the wages 
of labour; something in their minds, news of the 
world, the record of their journeying; not empty- 
handed, nor with empty minds must they come ; they 
must not disappoint their friends. But pause they 



VI] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 75 

must from time to time ; and the reverie will fall on 
both, and both again, but the elder first (if he be a 
fit teacher and have gained in life as he has gained 
in years) must be pricked and seized and pierced by 
curiosity once more, by wonder large and vague, and 
by wonder specially directed to some special thing. 
The good teacher sets an example of concentration 
and also of relaxation ; his attention is now narrowly 
f ocussed, and now his mind, like his eye, roams widely. 
It is clear now that when we speak of conversation 
we mean not indeed two irreconcilable tasks, but two 
activities of which one has a narrower and the other 
a wider range and province. The pupil, like his 
teacher, belongs specially to some place and some 
time, the place and time in which he is born and from 
which he sets out ; he has immediate neighbours and 
surroundings ; but he is also set in the infinite universe 
and his years are part of an eternity; he must learn 
to converse in both provinces. The interest and value 
of his conversation with those who are at first nearest 
to him and with whose lot his own is most closely 
bound up depend very much upon the frequency, 
and the length, of his adventurous expeditions into 
the wider province; the interest and value of his con- 
versation there depend very much upon the inti- 
macy and vividness of his relationship with those to 
whom he is most closely allied by birth and by the 
links of early inheritance and tradition. Unless he 
makes excursions, if he always stays at home, he will 
be very dull company for those who have to live with 
him: if he will never live at home, he can never be 



76 LIFE AND LANGUAGE [ch. 

a real man; when he makes his way abroad, he will 
only be a wraith, a simulacrum. And he must live 
at home, in a jealous isolation, within himself; to 
himself he must learn to speak, to himself he must 
listen; and the rule is stringent here also; if he will 
live only with himself, he will be dull company for 
himself; if he will never live with himself, he will 
have no substance, no reality on which his neigh- 
bours can seize. An individual he must be, a recluse ; 
but not less must he be a citizen of the world. 

Objection may be raised here by critics who should 
say that "citizen of the world" is a title of pleasant 
sound but of no clear meaning. The world, they may 
very properly say, is too big for any man to make 
his own ; along some very narrow track he must walk, 
and for no very long distance ; so much and no more 
is allotted to him, and within that province he must 
not only live, but in order to live he must even earn 
his living. All this is truly said, but it is not an 
objection to the claims which we have set up. The 
reply is very simple and can be quickly made : unless 
a man will fulfil the duties of his special and very 
narrowly limited sphere, he cannot be a citizen of 
the world, because he cannot be anything at all. But 
he can look out beyond the confines of his special 
sphere; he can enjoy holidays; he can make excur- 
sions ; and even if he stands still and listens and looks, 
all those things of which we spoke are his to con- 
template, to question, to appropriate and to enjoy. 
And a main reason, though not the only reason, for 
his stretching out in imagination and in actual ad- 



VI] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 77 

venture beyond his own plot of the earth is that 
unless he does this he cannot come into communication 
with his fellow men. 

Here we have the word which we earlier used — 
communication; for that he must have a heart of 
sympathy, the instinct of sociability, it is true ; but 
he must also possess the instrument of communication 
and, above all, matter to communicate. Now the 
subject matter for communication consists of those 
things which we named. Those things he apprehends 
from his own standpoint; those same things other 
men apprehend from theirs. Among men there may 
be some who, if we trust Wordsworth, have a special 
sensibility for these common things; on their lips 
common words, set in an order uncommon only 
because of its perfect propriety and fitted with a 
rare aptness to the things which they represent, 
may take on a special significance with a singular 
beauty. But the subject matter for poets and for 
ploughboys is drawn from the same world; it is the 
subject matter of daily commonplace experience. 
Some parts of the vast field of experience must 
necessarily be more familiar than others to any man ; 
some parts of it again a man must of necessity learn 
to deal with more quickly and more certainly than 
with others; upon his dealing with some parts his 
living depends. But, if he must be careful in walking 
along a street at night not to strike against a lamp- 
post, it is not for us to say that he must abandon the 
habit of star-gazing. If he must attend to what is 
going on under his very nose, it is not for us to say 



78 LIFE AND LANGUAGE [ch. 

that a breeze blowing from very pleasant places afar 
may not quicken his sense. 

Teachers must, to be sure, according to their 
capacity, help their pupils to fasten firmly upon the 
business of the moment and of the place in which 
they live; but not so firmly as to become literally 
absorbed in it and identified with it. They must 
themselves play other and larger parts than those 
assigned to them by their professions, narrowly and 
strictly defined. Too often they are taken by their 
pupils to be "teachers" and no more. They should 
present themselves as men who happen to be teachers. 
Too often they are regarded as animated subjects; 
one saying "I am Geography" and another "I am 
Mathematics." But men are better and bigger than 
subjects, and should not conceal their quality and 
their size too studiously and too long, lest the fearful 
nemesis befall them of becoming what with a mis- 
guided professional enthusiasm they have for years 
pretended or boasted to be. 

The danger does not beset teachers only; it lurks 
in waiting for all men who have any special function, 
even those who are dilettanti of nothing in particular. 
Men learn the jargon of their trade and speak to 
those who use it about their trade and that only; 
they are eaten up by the thing which gives them 
bread and butter. "Hence it comes," says Mr Lea- 
cock^, "that insurance men mingle with insurance 
men, liquor men, if one may use the term without 
after-thought, with liquor men: what looks like a 

1 Essays and Literary Studies: The Apology of a Professor, p. 13. 



VI] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 79 

lunch between three men at a club is really a cigar 
having lunch with a couple of plugs of tobacco." It 
were idle to argue that a man is absolved from the 
necessity of spending most of his time at that one 
thing or that small group of things, his work upon 
which is his contribution (little or great) to the 
general wealth of the world. That may and must be 
granted ; but it is not necessary for him to spend the 
whole of himself upon that thing or those few things. 
He must keep a margin inviolate, a balance un- 
touched; he must be able to call his soul his own. 
Of specialisation there is no end ; the man who devotes 
himself to one thing, will presently devote himself to 
a part of that thing and then to a fragment of that 
part. "The truth is," to cite Mr Leacock again, 
"that a modern professor for commercial purposes 
doesn't know anything. He only knows parts of 
things 1." 

It is not only the "professor" who falls under this 
indictment; but, if we bring other specialists under 
it, we must not forget that it falls only too often 
upon the teacher. He deals only with parts of things ; 
he is concerned only with a shrinking plot picked by 
caprice or chance out of the universe ; for the centre 
of that he makes his blinkered way ; if he ever tried 
to trace its boundary, he might discover that he had 
begun to define the world itself. It is worth while to 
ask an easy question — Why do children relish the 
large discourse of an old nurse or a gardener more 
than the lessons of their "teachers"? Our answer 

^ Op. cit. p. 30. 



8o LIFE AND LANGUAGE [ch. 

certainly is that the discourse of these persons is 
large. It may be inaccurate; but it leads on and 
outwards from one thing to another. The teacher is 
afraid of trespassing on another teacher's land. But 
without trespass there would never be exploration, 
annexation, conquest — and very little conversation. 
And to any lovers of peace who are affronted at these 
words which have the savour and suggestion of 
warfare, it must be a sufficient reply that the strife 
which we have hinted at is really internecine; the 
antagonists eat each other (as children say) quite up, 
so that nothing is left of them, except a memory 
incarnate at last in a society. 

We may now set out the elements, the subjects, the 
stages of the great curriculum in the language of a 
poet^ : 

Many a wonder walks the earth, but wondrous 

None is as Man: across the sea foam-white 
Driven by the storm-blast, plunging through the thund'rous 

Chasms of surge, he wings his aweless flight ; 
Layeth his grasp on Earth, supreme, undying 

Mother of Gods, and ever year by year 
To and fro pass his ploughs; the steed's sons plying 

Ever her stubborn strength, outweary her. 
Yea, and the airy-hearted birds he snareth, 

Trappeth the savage prowlers of the wold, 
Takes the brine-haunters whom the deep sea beareth 

In his net-meshes — Man the cunning-souled ; 
Quelleth the forest-crouching, mountain-roaming 

Monsters by his devices masterful, 
Bridles the stormy-maned, indignant-foaming 

Horses, and yokes the tireless mountain-bull. 
1 Sophocles, Antigone, 332 seq, trans. A. S. Way. 



VI] LIFE AND LANGUAGE 8i 

Speech hath he taught himself, and thought swift-flying 

Windlike, all instincts which the state maintain ; 
Shelter from frost he hath found, from cheerless lying 

Under the bleak sky, and from arrowy rain. 
Ever resourceful, found in nought resourceless. 

Dauntless he meets the future's mysteries : 
Helpless against Death only, the remorseless, 

His cunning foileth desperate maladies. 

Crafty inventions, subtle past believing. 

Now unto evil bring him, now to good. 
When he hath honoured Law, by oath receiving 

Justice's yoke, proudly his state hath stood. 
He is an outcast, whose presumptuous daring 

Moves him to be with sin confederate bound: 
Never abiding by my hearth, nor sharing 

Thoughts of my soul, be such transgressor found ! 



CHAPTER VII 
SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 

IF men make their gods in their own likeness, 
they cannot accept for themselves limitations 
which they would scorn to impose upon their divine 
creatures. "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness 
thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." 
This is the infinite field of human speculation because 
it is also the home in which men live. Within it men 
have made for themselves a partner, from whom they 
cannot be divorced, they have got an inmate, whom 
they cannot put out. They may assign to Him the 
fulness of the earth, they may say that the earth is 
His and all its inhabitants ; but He is theirs. Them- 
selves and yet not themselves. He is forever present 
and remote, revealed and hidden from them. He is 
the form in which they apprehend the world, in which 
they find or seek an intelligible unity in the confusing 
world which through Him they claim. He is the 
hypothesis on which they trust both for the coherency 
of their speech and for the rationality of their conduct. 
He is the vital condition upon which they must rely 
if their speculation is to go beyond the vague scanning 
of an unmeasured sky or an aimless wandering over 
a boundless earth, and become sight and under- 
standing, and if the home in which they live is to 
deserve its name by falling for them into ordered 
arrangement. He is what they need, — a boundary; 



CH.vii] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 83 

and, what they need not less, a boundary which moves 
and grows into an ever-widening horizon. If they are 
to have their world and dwell in it with content, they 
must come to an understanding with the God whom 
they have "made." 

If there is any truth in the paragraph which has 
just now been written, it is clear that wide and long 
as was the "curriculum" which was drawn in the 
preceding chapter it must now be made larger still. 
Men must give to themselves some account of ex- 
perience, they must interpret the world, they must 
not only possess, but, having called into their world 
a God, must recreate, the world which they possess, 
to become a place of habitation for Him as well as 
for themselves. This might have been put into philo- 
sophical language, or indeed into several varieties of 
philosophical language. Religious language has been 
used here for three reasons ; first, because it is at once 
more vivid and more general, and, second, because 
in fact philosophical enquiry, or at any rate that sort 
of philosophical enquiry which men have attempted 
in the hope of grasping the sum of things and re- 
garding Reality as a whole, would seem to have had 
its origin and sprung from religious meditation^. 

To have said this, it may now be argued, is to have 
gone even further than we went in the last chapter 
and to have gone altogether too far. Can it seriously 
be contended, the question will be asked, that the 
student of education is to range so widely, and that 
every child is to be considered not only free to wander 

^ Cf. Webb, God and Personality, p. 139. 

6—2 



84 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. 

in, but bound to explore this vast domain, that he is 
to learn to converse with the world, with man and 
with God? The reply, sufficient for the present is, 
that, nothing less than this can properly be claimed; 
that any selection from this total would be artificial 
and for our main purpose, that of understanding our- 
selves and our environment, disastrous, since we 
cannot attain the unity of view and the order of 
arrangement which we desire unless we hold within 
our view whatever the prospect offers and unless we 
draw into our system of arrangement whatever the 
mind has conceived. And these words which we have 
used, man, the world, God, stand for what men have, 
however variously and imperfectly, yet fashioned in 
imagination, recognised in experience and embodied 
in language itself. 

We have used the word "curriculum": it may 
suggest to our minds the image of a course, a race- 
course, indeed, marked out and fenced; a course on 
which no ordinary traffic is suffered to move, and on 
which only for exercise or for display specially selected 
creatures, carefully bred and judiciously trained, run 
under the eyes of owners, experts and bookmakers, 
who are conspicuous in a crowd of habitual idlers or 
of revellers who enjoy an occasional holiday. Such 
a race-course has its uses, not the least of which is 
found in the pleasure which it affords to that large 
company of spectators whom we last named. The 
word curriculum, used as it is more frequently in a 
narrower sense, calls to our minds the training itself; 
and the stages and methods of the training, through 



VII] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 85 

which the competitors are made to pass in prepara- 
tion for the day of trial. There is much propriety and 
very real conformity with fact in the employment of 
this word by those who wish to describe what is done 
in schools. It is true that they very seldom expressly 
use the comparison which we have proposed of a 
school to a race-course; but they have no objection 
to the curriculum standing for the subjects which are 
taught and learnt in schools, and even for the methods 
by which they are taught. Just as horses are trained 
to run, to jump over fences and over water, so boys 
and girls are taught, in dealing with various subjects, 
to go through certain exercises and performances. 

And there is this above all which gives the analogy 
a very strong claim to acceptance. We distinguish 
between other kinds of horses by naming the different 
sorts of work which they wiU have to do; some are 
cart-horses, and some carriage-horses, and some 
saddle-horses; but all these are distinguished from 
racers. To be sure racers contribute to the stock from 
which these other, work-a-day horses are bred; but 
they form a class apart. We need not say that they 
are an aristocracy, but we shall make ourselves ridi- 
culous if we confuse them with the rest. They are in 
the world of horses, but not of it. Now while boys 
and girls remain in schools or colleges it might well be 
supposed that they correspond with racers, specially 
trained for a special performance. They are carefully 
sequestered ; they are kept as much as may be out of 
the world and its occupations; they are being prac- 
tised in exercises, which appear to be and often are 



86 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. 

alien to the exercises of the world; and the world 
marks the distinction very clearly by sajdng that, 
when school or college days are over, then work shall 
begin. But some of these pupils and students become 
so good at their scholastic and academic performances 
and, it is felt both by themselves and by the world, 
so wholly unfit for the activities of the world, that 
both choice and necessity make them pursue these 
exercises still further ; still faster do they learn to move 
along their sheltered and fenced courses, still more 
difficult hurdles do they get the skill to take, still 
wider water jumps do they attempt with success; but 
upon the high road they do not set their feet, a load 
they do not draw, — in a word, they do not work. And 
it is those who have not the aptitude for these ad- 
vanced studies, happily and yet unhappily, the vast 
majority, who, when they have done their best at 
the curriculum, leave it and take their place and 
make their way upon the common road of men. 

It is not surprising that not in our own day for the 
first time the world has raised protests against the 
curriculum of schools. The protests have often been 
misdirected because those who made them have been 
ignorant and misinformed. But there has always been 
this of substantial value in their complaints, whether 
or not they have been fully justified in particular 
instances. The world is right in claiming that the 
schools and colleges should train men and women 
who can play largely and variously the parts which 
fall to men and women in the world; and right in 
condemning academic training if the only result for 



VII] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 87 

those who are successful in it is that they are merely 
capable of undergoing more and more of that training 
upon a training ground which is cut off from the rest 
of the world; and right again if the only result for 
those who fall a little or very much short of success 
in it is that they have accumulated a store of know- 
ledge which they are ready to consign to some lumber- 
room of their minds until they can get rid of it by 
forgetting it; or have learnt some accompHshments 
which they will never need to practise again ; the world 
is right if, when school days or college days are past, 
they have then to learn to work. Such protests and 
complaints, though, as we have admitted, they are 
often ill-directed, suggest a positive statement of the 
function of schools and colleges which may not always 
be made by the authors of the protests and com- 
plaints. They suggest the positive statement that 
schools and colleges should quite certainly prepare 
those who pass through them for their business in 
life, and point to the belief, half-formed, perhaps, and 
inarticulate, that, so far as they fail of this object, the 
reason is that the curriculum is too narrow; that the 
track along which the training has been conducted 
is fenced off too sharplj^ from the world, and that 
the exercises which are so diligently and perhaps so 
expensively cultivated, whatever they may be, afford 
no preparatory practice for those other exercises, 
for which the general, comprehensive name is work. 
There is some justice in these opinions expressly 
declared or silently entertained; yet there is injustice 
also. The distinction drawn between what is and 



88 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. 

what is not work is hard and corresponds very imper- 
fectly with the truth. Preparation for life is a larger 
matter than preparation for work, if work means those 
activities which can be paid for in money, or in 
political or social consideration. Life includes the 
whole of our activities, those which have no market 
value not less than those which have such a value : 
life is more than activities unless we are willing 
to include under the title of activities not only what 
we do but what we are. It certainly includes play; 
it embraces the luxuries as well as the necessities of 
existence ; indeed to live is to claim luxuries as neces- 
sities, though it is not to confuse work with play. The 
distinction is unfortunate in its results for those who 
insist upon it, for it strongly tends to perpetuate the 
very state of things which they deplore. It tends to 
encourage the young in the determination to have 
"a. good time" whUe they can, knowing that pre- 
sently "work" and a time not good must await them. 
And it has the further effect of persuading them, when 
they have entered upon their work, to compress it 
into as narrow limits as they can, so that there may 
be a margin left, as wide as they can make it, for 
pleasure or even for life, which they not unnaturally 
learn to alienate altogether from their work. 

There is a further objection which must be made 
against those who find fault with our schools and 
colleges on the grounds which we have considered. 
They expect or appear to expect these institutions to 
give their pupils practice in those special activities 
which are peculiar to the special work which will be 



VII] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 89 

theirs in later life. Some apologists for the schools 
and colleges reply that it is their function not to do 
this, but rather to develop the powers of their pupils 
in such a way that whatever they may have to under- 
take when they leave their schools and colleges they 
shall come to it alert, intelligent and strong; ready 
to discover what they have to do and to make a 
beginning; resolute to persevere in face of obstacles, 
to adapt themselves to the conditions in which they 
are or to remould these conditions to themselves, 
never losing sight of the end which they desire to 
attain; and with the wit to profit by the lessons of 
failure and of success, by the criticisms of their neigh- 
bours, and, most important of all, by the criticisms 
which they direct upon themselves. To this there is 
an easy and indeed a forcible reply. It may justly be 
said that, though the objects which have been named 
ought certainly to be sought, they can be sought and 
found only by those who will take the pains to pursue 
them by doing certain things. Quickness of percep- 
tion, perseverance, adaptability, readiness to learn and 
the practice of self-criticism are all good; but they 
are to be had, if they are had at all, by those who 
will act in such a manner, and engage in such activities 
as call these qualities, if not into existence, at any 
rate into effective operation. And the critics of schools 
and colleges are bold to maintain that the exercises 
which are practised in these places do not lead to the 
development of these qualities. 

It is not necessary to agree with them, or at the 
moment to disagree : it is enough to listen to what 



90 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. 

they say and to let them say more. Already they 
have made two statements, first, that the exercises 
of schools and colleges are not of the same kind as 
those which will confront their pupils in later life; 
and, second, that these exercises, such as they are, 
fail to reach the ends for the attainment of which it 
is professed that they were designed. What they go 
on either to say in plain terms or very clearly to 
suggest is that, if in school other exercises were sub- 
stituted for those which are now customary, the pupils 
might be provided with knowledge which they could 
use, and at any rate be prepared by practice for the 
discharge of duties which will fall to them, and perhaps 
even acquire the very qualities which the accepted 
studies claim but fail to achieve. Let education, they 
say, be practical. 

At this point in the argument a third voice is heard. 
It is that of a man who speaks in a tone of annoyance 
and declares that it matters nothing what boys and 
girls or young men and women are taught in their 
schools and colleges provided they follow the right 
methods and are subjected to the proper discipline. 
The intervention is useful, because it brings the two 
main antagonists to closer grips and helps them to 
approach a reconciliation. The advocates of the 
schools have maintained that the traditional subjects 
as customarily taught have the effect of forming a 
certain type of mind and character which they believe 
to be good and which their opponents would them- 
selves praise if they could come to believe that it 
really was formed by these subjects and the methods 



VII] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 91 

associated with them. They now take heart to say- 
that these subjects have a value in themselves, that 
they are worth possessing. We have then two pairs 
of statements or claims : 

A (i) that the traditional subjects and methods 
produce a valuable kind of mind and character; 

(2) that these subjects are in themselves valuable; 

B (i) that subjects and methods which the world 
of after-school uses ought to be also the subjects and 
methods of the school world; 

(2) that these subjects and methods may be able 
to form just that sort of mind and character which 
both parties agree in calling good. 

The representatives of both parties can now look 
each other frankly and squarely in the face and can 
smUe. 

To the claim A (i) that the traditional subjects and 
methods produce a valuable kind of mind and char- 
acter, both parties must admit an objection: it is that 
the claim cannot be proved. To prove it one would 
have to show that for making the valuable kind of 
mind and character these agencies and no others have 
been employed ; but it is clear that a thousand other 
agencies touch and influence the most carefully se- 
cluded and guarded pupils. 

The statement A (2) that these subjects are in 
themselves valuable provokes a question. Valuable, 
it may be asked, to whom and for what purpose ? 

To statement B (i) again a question may be raised. 
It may be asked, since not all the subjects and 
methods of the world of after-school could possibly 



92 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. 

be crowded into school or college life, which of these 
are to be selected and on what grounds is the choice 
to be made? 

To statement B (2) a sufficient reply could be made 
in words of welcome to a pious hope, the fulfilment 
of which cannot be guaranteed. 

The disputants have now come much nearer to one 
another than they were; or rather they see at last 
that the differences which divide them are less great 
than they supposed. Both parties are pledged to the 
belief that to do certain things will enable those who 
have practised these things to do other things after- 
wards. Both parties are pledged to the further belief 
that certain kinds of knowledge are worth possessing. 
If we examine these common beliefs we may yet find 
some evidence of difference between the two parties. 
We need not be surprised if the same formula, the 
same dogma holds some varieties of meaning as it falls 
from different lips. The upholders of tradition, as we 
may for the moment call them, claim that the study 
and practice of the classics, of history or of mathe- 
matics enable those who have engaged in them to 
pass readily and usefully to the practice and study of 
affairs, of business, of the work of the world. And the 
opposing party declares that this is too much to 
believe, because the work of the world (except for 
those who trade in classics, in history or in mathe- 
matics) is quite different from those studies ; and in 
support of their own position they maintain that the 
preliminary study and practice of some of the things 
which will have to be learnt and done in the world 



VII] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 93 

will assist us to study and practise other things of 
the same kind. 

The last contention is very plausible and fair- 
seeming ; but it cannot bear a close scrutiny. ' ' What, ' ' 
we have to ask, "is meant by the same kind? " The 
work of the world is very various; are we to say that 
the work of a stockbroker and that of a sanitary 
engineer are of the same kind? Are the work of a 
bookseller and the work of a marine store dealer of 
the same kind? of a cotton-broker and a tram-driver 
of the same kind? The kind must have a very wide 
definition if it is to include the special labours of all 
these different persons. Or can we anticipate with a 
sure and certain expectation that this boy will take 
up, when he leaves school or college, this and not that 
occupation or calling, that another boy will take up 
another, and are we to give to each a training and a 
preparation in the elements of the business which he 
will presently make his own? We cannot forecast the 
future with this sort of confidence, and, if we could, 
what are the "elements" of each of those and of a 
thousand other professions? Are the elements of one 
different from the elements of another? Is it seriously 
proposed that there should be classes or schools 
specially provided, equipped, and directed so as to 
enable children who are "born" grocers to be nour- 
ished and trained in grocery; those who are "born" 
clerks to be fostered "clerically"? If some children 
are born with silver spoons in their mouths, we may 
well be content with those monsters; children are not 
born with paper-bags and scales in their hands or 



94 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. 

fountain pens and copying lead pencils behind their 
ears. Time's hard graving tools may trace upon men's 
foreheads signs by which we may know their avoca- 
tions even better than by the legends painted over 
their shop-fronts, beaten in brass upon their door- 
plates, or stamped upon their letter paper ; men may 
wear badges of office and ceremonial dress ; nakedness 
and hope are the happy insignia of chUdhood. No 
language could be found too rich for describing the 
bare possibilities of infants. 

And since no language in which that theme could 
be fully set forth would satisfy those who do not 
recognise that the theme needs no argument, we may 
fall back at once upon the use of a dilemma one 
horn of which we have already offered to accom- 
modate our adversaries. If they do not welcome what 
we have offered, if they will not maintain that the 
elements of the special trades and professions are 
themselves special, then we must inquire whether 
they think that the elements are general and common. 
Is the elementary education to be the same for 
those who may diverge after awhile from each other, 
taking some this, some that and some another path? 
They will be disposed, we think, to prefer this 
alternative. And we are bound to trouble them once 
more, for we must ask what more precisely this 
education is to be, of what it is to be composed, and 
to what end directed. And there is but one answer; 
its end is to prepare the young for commerce, for 
conversation, for dealing with the world; it must 
consist of speech, it must enable them to use the in- 



VII] SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE 95 

strument of communication, it must give them access 
to those things of which they are the heirs in virtue 
of their humanity. To the whole of their inheritance 
we know that they can never succeed ; but the right 
of entry they have, and it is for us to supply them 
with the keys, for them to use as their fortune, their 
ability, and their taste may suffer or direct them. 

The acceptance of this doctrine would go far 
towards making for us a coherent and unified society 
and an orderly system of education. It would break 
down the unhappy and mischievous distinction which 
now stands between "elementary" and "secondary" 
schools. Boys and girls must learn to speak their own 
language, clearly, pleasantly, reasonably; and in it 
to deal with matters of general, indeed of universal, 
concern. The greatest matters are also the simplest, 
and those with which we are all as human beings 
interested. An elementary education should develop 
and train ability to speak, to listen, to read, to write, 
to reckon. It cannot do more ; but less it must not 
do. Upon this foundation the structure of further 
education can be raised; but not without it: for 
further education consists in learning ever more 
clearly and fully what these words mean, what is in- 
volved in these activities. We may learn a second and 
a third language, and have got no more education for 
our labour, unless each is for us a new form of human 
speech, by which we make ourselves known to our 
fellows and come to understand them, tuning our ears 
to catch the voice and the meaning of men as they 
spoke long ago, or of others set far from us not in 



96 SUBJECTS OF DISCOURSE [ch. vii 

time, but in measured distances of land or sea: and 
with this lesson learnt, we fit our own voices to carry 
to our cdntemporaries and successors what we have 
to say to them of ourselves, and of our world, both 
enriched by the practice of communication. 

We still think and act as if there were several 
kinds of education — elementary, secondary, technical,, 
academic. There may indeed be many modes of edu- 
cation, but there can only be one kind; there may be 
many stages, but only one foundation ; there may be 
many roads, but only one goal — the discovery and 
realisation ma(|e by a man of himself and of the world 
in which he liv^s, and the serene enjoyment of both. 
It is not only schools which would profit by framing 
their programme for this end. Universities might fill 
a greater part in the national life, if they were beyond 
doubt or question devoted wholly to the quest of aij 
abundant life, and not, even in part or in appearance, 
to the very different quest of a multitude of accom- 
plishments. "Research for research's sake" would 
soon follow "Art for art's sake," first into disrepute 
and then into oblivion. It would be accompanied by 
"Research for ostentation's sake," and Research for 
pay." This is no plea for a "general" education, in 
which many things or all thing's are attempted and 
nothing done with precision and perfection; it is a plea 
for a recognition of the plain truth that scholars and 
other men live in the same world, and that it as much 
befits "scholars" to be men of the world, as men of 
the world-to be ^'scholarly" in the methods and ends 
which they set themselves. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 

, AS in simple households breakages are by a pleasant 
l\ convention attributed to the cat, so in that larger 
household which we call the state losses and failures 
are often set down to the account of the teacher. The 
range of this custom gives the measure of the teacher's 
authority and influence. It is all his fault, we say, 
and we are surprised if he does not at once admit 
his guilt. We should be entitled to feel surprise if 
our charge against him were quite general; for it 
would be ingratitude in him not to accept with 
courtesy a compliment, however clumsily paid. We 
feign for him a contempt which we do not at our heart 
entertain, and the 'proof is that, when things go ill, 
when our neighbours in other countries outstrip us 
in the arts of peace, or baffle us in those of war, we 
turn upon him as in some way responsible — why 
should he not agree? Why should he not thankfully 
agree and confess the justice of our accusation? To 
saddle him with responsibility is to credit him with 
power — power ill-used, misdirected or wrapped in a 
napkin and buried perhaps, but power still. Surely 
contrition should be easy for him, blended as it must 
be with conscious pride. Instead of telling us that 
parents, too, and statesmen and persons of every 
class and order in the community must share with 



98 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

him his duty — a commonplace already current upon 
the lips of men when they are talking at ease, but 
denied when definite matters of urgent importance 
are in hand, he should rather, so we feel, expose 
himself to our attack and cherish the shafts which 
we hurl against him "'Me — me — ^in me convertite 
tela,' for your weapons are the insignia of my office." 
But the teacher does not thus address us, and we 
may ask why he misses his opportunity. It is for a 
simple reason. Our charges are, in appearance at any 
rate, too specific. "It is all his fault," we say and 
repeat ; but we go on to say in what special respect he 
has failed us. And here we may well be unfair both 
to him and to ourselves — unfair to him in charging 
him with a particular offence, of which he could, 
if we would but listen to him, show his innocence 
by a very pertinent reply; and unfair to ourselves 
in giving too narrow, and often a quite improper, 
name to our real grievance. We complain that he 
does not give us what we want, implying that he 
could if he would; but, when we state explicitly what 
we believe we want, we are apt to misjudge, not only 
him, but ourselves. And we may run the risk of 
confusing him by the variety of our specific demands 
or our definitely named complaints. Now one thing, 
now another, we lament ; and, if he hastens to meet 
in order our sundry and ill-considered claims, we have 
another damaging count — we complain that the cur- 
riculum is too crowded, "Who crowded it? " he may 
with decent indignation cry — Not he, that long- 
suffering man. 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 99 

We shall get what we ask for ; if we do not get what 
we want and what we like, it is because we have not 
accurately interpreted our need and given it the right 
name. If our system of education does not satisfy us, 
it is we who are to blame — we, the parents, the 
citizens, the ordinary people who control it, provide 
it, pay for it. We are eager for power, shy of responsi- 
bility; but they go together. It is natural for us to 
forget this in these days of Government departments 
and more potent local authorities. Like teachers, the 
persons who fill these places may be viewed in two 
aspects; they are our representatives and servants, 
appointed to do what we want; they are also our 
equals, of the same stuff as the rest of us. To say 
this is not to disparage them. Let us grant that they 
are great men, of a delicate sensibility to judge what 
will best fashion the tender grace of youth to the 
mature beauty of manhood and bring golden promises 
to the rich fulfilment of developed and balanced 
powers, students of the methods and ideals of the 
past, and quick to devise fit methods for the ideals 
of our own time — the nobler the part they play, the 
more certainly is it shown to be the part of servants. 
If they have a special, it is also a partial responsi- 
bility; the general, the whole responsibility is ours 
shared with them as fellow-citizens. What then do 
we want? And what is it that we ask for to-day? 

One demand is very often made, and expressed, in 
the form of a complaint ; we complain of the neglect of 
science. Is it true that we want "science," or more of 
it than we have? That would seem to be our meaning. 



100 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

We are, in fact, uncomfortable and alarmed^; we 
expect, of couse, to "muddle through," we are con- 
fident that all will be well at last; but we have the 
troublesome conviction in our minds that we should 
have done better and gone faster with the War, if we 
had had more "science " ; we suspect that it is because 
they have had science as their ally or their slave that 
the Germans, having outraged the Western world, 
still hold out, weakened, we know, but unconquered, 
we admit. Not long ago, and then too in resentment 
and fear of German progress, it was "technical in- 
struction" that we called for — that and more of that, 
and to-day it is "science." The call for science is 
loudly raised and by many persons who might be at 
a loss for an answer if they were asked what precisely 
they meant. And those who might have told us have 
been singularly reluctant to provide us with an inter- 
pretation of the word, for the neglect of science has 
been bewailed most bitterly by "men of science." 
They, of course, know what science is. Is it not their 
property, their creation? 

And we, common men and women, dimly or pain- 
fully aware that something is amiss with us and with 
the body politic, are ready, only too ready, to put 
a name upon our failings. " What have we omitted? " 
we ask, and we get in response "you have neglected 
science." "To be sure, we have neglected science," 
is our echo; "those teachers in schools and Univer- 
sities have failed us again." We thank the men of 
science and promise to speak to the defaulters and 

^ Written in July 1916. 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES loi 

tell them what we think of them. Addressed, ar- 
raigned, what have they put forward in defence ? At 
first, and not unnaturally, they take up a legal mode 
of argument, and remind us that, at our instance, they 
are teaching science already; that, at our command, 
every Secondary school in receipt of public grants 
provides instruction in science, whatever else it may 
omit from its programme of studies; that the Uni- 
versities, old and new, have increased their scientific 
equipment, enlarged their laboratories, doubled their 
staff of science teachers, and that "Elementary 
Science" has long had its vogue in Elementary 
schools. Is it more "science" that we need, and 
still more? The realm of science has been widened, 
new provinces and departments have been revealed 
and presently marked out and given over to special- 
ists; and yet we are not satisfied; are we to await 
the opening of a wider horizon, an ampler dawn, 
when more new provinces, more new departments, 
and specialists, yet unborn, will be given us? Are 
we to hasten that day? 

To them that have there shall be given, all the 
more certainly and abundantly if they eagerly seek 
and insistently demand. We have science and it is 
very likely that we shall get more science and more 
sciences. Is this what we really want? And what 
after all is science? Two common answers to these 
questions may be quickly considered. We are familiar 
with lists of subjects dealt with in our Universities in 
their Faculties of Science and in schools in their 
modern or scientific departments. Let us not at- 



102 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

tempt to be philosophical, the practical man will 
admonish us; these subjects are sciences, the total of 
these and similar subjects is what by general consent 
is called Science, Or we may offer another answer. 
By science we mean such knowledge of the world's 
material forces as will enable us to control them and 
turn them to our service. Science is the name of 
knowledge of that kind; let us get more science, and 
we shall be able more and more completely to master 
these forces. Our use of what we have is shown in our 
ability to get more ; money we use to get more money; 
property of whatever sort to acquire more property, 
and with all this the weapons with which to fight for 
what we desire and to defend it against aggressors. 
Science shows us how to use what we have ; if we can 
get more science, we shall use what we have to greater 
advantage. Science provides us with the machinery 
for acquisition. We have machines to carry us and 
our goods by land and sea, to traffic and increase our 
store — machines for collecting and combining the 
materials of our food, our clothing, our dwellings; we 
have instruments and drugs for mitigating pain, and 
correcting human deformities and stimulating the 
tired energies of men; and we have — wrought with 
not less care and lavished upon a far vaster scale — 
the engines of destruction and of death. And all these 
we owe to science. 

Is it pretended, the advocates of science so con- 
ceived ask, that classical scholarship will issue in 
these glorious results? Will history and music achieve 
these ends? And there is only one reply. These 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 103 

studies do not yield these fruits. Classical scholarship 
breeds its kind — more classical scholarship; history 
and music, pursued, lead to more music and a more 
elaborate history. And the persons who are devoted 
to these matters do not extend our domain over 
nature or strengthen our mastery of her powers. Let 
us then have fresh recourse to science ; for, it is said, 
we have neglected her, and we suffer for our failure. 
Much we have profited by scientific work done ; much 
more may we hope to profit by renewed application : 
and to enforce a moral on ourselves we raise the 
German spectre. 

Now the men of science who in this country have 
lately been upbraiding us for neglecting science have 
not said that they are themselves less eminent than 
men of science in Germany or elsewhere — they would 
probably be guilty of a false and mischievous modesty 
if they did; they have not even told us that there is 
less "science" here than there. But what appears is 
that science and scientists are less sought out here 
than elsewhere for their advice and their help. No 
doubt more and more our great manufacturers employ 
scientific men ; but still not enough. They should take 
to such men problems of which they see the import- 
ance but not the solution, and employ them for their 
purposes. Scientific men are not all unwilling, we may 
conceive, to be employed and paid ; we need business 
men of enough imagination to turn them to account. 
The sterihty of learned persons is notorious; the useful 
energy of business men is a theme not unsung; but 
if the busy bees refused to visit the flowers, seeking 



104 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

honey and carrying the fertilising pollen upon their 
industrious thighs, flowers of the field might be as un- 
productive as scientists wilting upon their lonely stalks. 
But scientists, however exactly similar in other 
respects, differ from flowers in having voices. They 
should use them; but they should select the proper 
audience. They have something to sell; let them call 
out to those who are able to buy, not without money 
or without price. The rich manufacturers, the capi- 
talists should be their prey or their beneficiaries. To 
them they should turn and say: "You have great 
wealth; you control machinery; we can improve your 
machinery, of whatever kind it may be ; we can make 
it more productive; it shall move at a greater speed 
than any yet attained ; and, again, the by-products 
of your processes we can turn to better and better 
purpose, if you will listen to us ; and things of which 
you have only dreamed, or things yet undreamed of, 
we can put into your possession." They are too reti- 
cent and too retiring; they have allowed themselves 
the coyness of Celia; they must practise the "coming 
on disposition" of Rosalind, and persuade the rich to 
employ them. The number of men in England who 
would spend a thousand pounds if they were convinced 
that they would get back two thousand must still be 
considerable; the men of science might find that it 
was very large and even overwhelming ; it might turn 
out that the demand for men of science would be so 
insistent and so general that more men of science 
would be needed, and then, as they cannot be manu- 
factured, they must be reared. Schools and Univer- 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 105 

sities, hitherto the dusty treasuries of unmarketable 
things, would be caught by the breath of the new 
movement; they would become the training ground 
for young scientists, students with a career before 
them, being prepared to supply the world with what 
it wanted. Then ancient studies would be abandoned, 
if they could not be remodelled ; many of their teachers 
would be dismissed, perhaps with pensions large 
enough to remind them of the uses of money, or 
consigned to more appropriate asylums. Others might 
be collected by the curious, like Pekingese terriers for 
their fluffy prettiness, or like love-birds for their 
touching amiability, for their affectionate little ways. 
And science harnessed to industry and commerce 
would produce more and more wonderful machines, 
the means of communication would be made more 
rapid throughout the World, and — there would not 
be an idea to be shared by men who had enslaved 
themselves and lost their souls. 

If all this is a travesty of what men of science 
desire it is a travesty which not a few of their sup- 
porters will, if they are not prevented, be disposed 
to force upon them and upon us all. For it is too little 
perceived even now that it is not in virtue of science 
or knowledge of sciences, or the application of them 
to this or that special object, that the Germans have 
grown strong. They have grown strong because they 
have set certain ends clearly before them, and have 
sought for the means by which these ends could be 
achieved. But, what is far more important, their ends 
have been organised, co-ordinated, unified. They have 



io6 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

known more exactly and clearly than we have known 
what they wanted from science, and they have seen 
to it that there should be a supply of men prepared 
by their general as well as by their special training to 
supply what was asked of them, viz., their contribu- 
tion to a system of ends, to a conception of their state. 
That system, that conception, we have come to hate, 
for, while it excludes much that we think essential, 
it includes much that we think hostile to humanity. 
It is a system which sooner or later humanity will 
break; but it is strong, not because it is good, but 
because it is a system, and, more than that, because 
it is a body of belief. And it will be broken by humanity 
because its violent challenge has made or is making 
humanity seek a system, a body of belief, and suffers 
it no longer to be contented with vague, indefinite, 
unconcerted, disorganised fragments of belief. The 
strength of German education as of German civilisa- 
tion, has been its centraHsation, in its organisation. 
Organisation sounds Ul in English ears, and hasty 
critics warn us in education, as they are pleased to 
regard it, to be on our guard against organisation. 
For they make two mistakes about organisation ; first, 
they think of it as the rigid arrangement in separate 
departments, of special interests and concerns, each 
one complete in itself and independent; whereas, if 
it is to be real, it must mean not less than the co- 
ordination of all these departments within and as 
parts of a whole; and then, they think of it in the 
terms of material things, and of ofhce routine, and 
express themselves in the language of Committees. 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 107 

But organisation means the embodiment of a creed, 
unifying a community by expressing the common 
meaning of its members. 

Now it is easier to make a mean than a majestic 
creed ; it is easier to win adherence and allegiance (for 
a time) to the narrow interpretation of the needs and 
desires of a society or a party (needs which become 
themselves at once the narrower and the more com- 
pact for such an interpretation) , than to secure loyalty 
to ideas which have not yet established amongst 
themselves a vivid relationship, expressed in a form 
at once clear and elastic. And this is the reason why 
Germany has been so powerful: she has known her 
own mind ; she has been mistress of her own resources, 
she has ordered them to a clearly seen end. And 
organisation for her has meant more than mere 
officialism, for her officialism has been sjnnbolic. It 
has represented the focussing, in all departments of 
her life, of her varied energies upon the maintenance 
and enlargement of that life. 

We have indeed had, and now more passionately 
than ever cherish, ideals, many of which Germany 
has either never known, or forsworn; but we have 
not had organisation in its proper sense, we have not 
had co-ordinating organisation, the comprehensive 
expression a belief in which our ideals are harmonised 
and wrought both severally and collectively to their 
highest power. This has been our misfortune and our 
fault. It is nowhere more fully illustrated than in our 
speech and action in regard to education. For we 
have not yet regarded Education as a part of the 



io8 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

national life, inseparable from other parts, affecting 
them and influenced by them; and within the wide 
and loosely determined province which we call Educa- 
tion we have not yet achieved and scarcely attempted 
organisation. We have not made our way to a vital- 
ising and unifying conception of it as a whole. We 
began, forty years after we were warned, to organise 
our Secondary schools; but we can hardly imagine 
that Matthew Arnold would have been pleased with 
what we have done in his name. We have set up a 
new class of schools, but we have not illumined our 
national education as a whole with a new and radiant 
idea. And the result is that, for all the good these 
new Secondary schools have done as yet in detail (and 
in detail they have done much good), our national 
education is not more, but less, systematised than it 
was before. We have not yet decided how and when 
pupils are to get into these new schools, nor how and 
when they are to get out of them, nor yet what to do 
while they remain in them. But a society is a system 
of living relationships; and to throw into a society, 
already ill-organised, a society which not quite per- 
fectly deserves that title, a new and unrelated element, 
is not to help it towards its proper goal, but to hinder 
its progress. We may justly entertain the highest 
hopes for our new Secondary schools; but if they are 
to fulfil these hopes we must form a clear conception 
of the service which they are to render to our national 
life in general, and of the relation in which they are 
to stand to our Elementary schools, to our Public 
schools, and to our Universities. 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES 109 

It may quite truly be said that the study of nature 
and her forces is necessary for the education of the 
human mind together with a study of man and his 
powers and achievements: it may well be granted 
that some study of nature and her forces, of the 
subjects called collectively science, is necessary for 
an intelligent and fruitful study of the humanities: 
it should surely be granted that some command of 
language is necessary for formulating scientific pro- 
blems, for expressing the solutions which we may 
reach and not less for understanding what problems 
and what answers have already risen in the minds 
of our own people and of workers in other countries. 
It is not hard in general terms to harmonise these 
two claims ; it should not be impossible even in practice 
to make some useful combination of them. "Arts" 
students in our Universities might quite well, without 
loss to their literary, historical or other studies, be 
required, all of them (as those who are being prepared 
for teaching in Elementary schools have been re- 
quired) to give some part of their time to some 
scientific subject; and "Science" students not less 
well might be required to give some of their time to 
literature or history. But this, though it would help 
us forward, is not enough; for even with this safe- 
guard the danger, which we have not hitherto escaped, 
would still threaten and even overtake us. For it is 
not knowledge of any or of all these things that we 
chiefly need : and the danger is lest persons who have 
acquired some or even much knowledge in these 
matters may think they have done all that they ought 



no SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. 

to do. The danger is lest we should cut off both 
literature and science from their roots. 

No more "practical" utterance upon our present 
problem could well be found than a sentence of Pro- 
fessor Burnet's in his Greek Philosophy from Thales to 
Plato. " We find," he says, " that every serious attempt 
to grapple with the problem of reality brings with it 
a great advance in positive science, and that this has 
always ceased to flourish when interest in that pro- 
blem was weak^." Technology needs no advocates; 
their name is legion; but, though technology depends 
on science, the application of science to the comfort 
and the discomfort of men must be clearly distin- 
guished from science itself. We may make ourselves 
more comfortable in peace, and our enemies more 
miserable in war, by increased application of scientific 
knowledge to these ends; but if these are the ends we 
set out to seek we may soon kill science itself. And 
we have to remember that science is already threat- 
ened by the very progress of the sciences. I shall 
quote a philosopher once more: "The world of 
thought," wrote Professor Hobhouse in his Theory 
of Knowledge, "at the present day is in a somewhat 
anomalous condition. We have come to the point 
where science seems to stand in real danger of being 
ruined by her own success. The mass of accumulated 
fact in which she justly prides herself has become too 
vast for any single mind to master. . . . Year by year it 
becomes more difficult to take any sort of view of the 
whole field of knowledge, which should be at once 

1 pp. II, 12. 



VIII] SCIENCE AND SCIENCES iii 

comprehensive and accurate. It results that positive 
knowledge can scarcely be said any longer to have a 
general purpose or tendency. Intellectually it is an 
age of detail 1." 

But, where there is no purpose or tendency, organi- 
sation has either failed or ceased to exist. An age of 
detail is an age without belief, and belief is the 
vitalising source and main-spring of organisation. 
Professor Hobhouse wrote the passage just quoted 
twenty years ago. On the same page he adds : " So far 
from seeing our way to a near or distant synthesis, we 
are more disturbed than ever when we turn from 
science to philosophy. Instead of uniting the sciences, 
philosophy threatens to become a separate and even 
a hostile doctrine." And on the next page he proceeds : 
"An elegant scepticism about science takes the place 
of the elegant scepticism of theology with which our 
fore-fathers were familiar." But, dismissing scepticism 
"as a mere symptom of temporary intellectual para- 
lysis," he is not without good hope of a synthesis yet 
to be achieved, and few writers are better entitled to 
the hope, for few have done more to bring it to ful- 
filment. If it is easier for a camel to pass through the 
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the 
Kingdom of heaven, the reason is that the camel after 
all is one camel, and the "rich" man, playing many 
different roles, being many persons, may not win that 
oneness which we call personality. There is so much 
of him that at last there have come to be many of 
him. But that is just what has befallen education; 

1 Preface, p. vii. 



112 SCIENCE AND SCIENCES [ch. viii 

there is so much of it, that there have come to be 
many of it ; so much knowledge that, in the name of 
convenience, we have set up many knowledges. We 
have named them, labelled them, departmentalised 
them, and taken the soul out of them. Of course, we 
must learn science, and the sciences; of course we 
must apply them to practical uses. But why? not in 
order that we may get more armchairs and more 
explosives; but in order that we may get at reality 
and discover and possess ourselves in a life which, if 
rich, shall yet be intelligent because unified, and in 
a society which, if large and made of many elements, 
shall yet be governed by a unifying belief. To this 
end the development of scientific studies must con- 
tribute an essential service ; if the vision of this end 
does not inspire us, the progress of science will but 
yield the increase of detail, and its success will be its 
disaster and our undoing. 



CHAPTER IX 
WORK AND PLAY 

THE belief which the preceding pages have been 
written to justify is that a man's education is the 
long process by which he learns to subordinate himself 
to the control of an ideal society. This society is to 
give him the highest development of his powers such 
as they may be, by co-ordinating them with the 
kindred but not identical powers of his fellows, 
trained, like himself, by the necessity of co-operation, 
to such perfection as is appropriate to them. Perfect 
adjustment is the only perfect freedom, but freedom 
is formed in service of dominant ideal. But service 
in an ideal society cannot be rendered by slaves or 
automata. That society, which moulds its members 
to its own eternal design, is itself formed and brought 
into being by them; created, they are also creators, 
working slowly through an intelligent recognition of 
the claims of any temporal and visible society in 
which they find their place. Here too, and here already, 
they are servants but by the very perfection of their 
service they refashion the city, the state, in which 
they dwell to the pattern of that other city in which 
they claim membership. Service, subjection, sub- 
ordination, are words and notions distasteful to many 
people. The advocates of freedom unfettered, the 
apostles of individuality find ready listeners and en- 
thusiastic followers. 



114 WORK AND PLAY [ch. 

Few men have done so much to ennoble our con- 
ception of Education as Professor T. P. Nunn ; to few 
is the present writer so much indebted for generous 
help, for stimulating advice ; to few indeed, would he 
more gladly offer if he might a tribute of affectionate 
and respectful admiration. There will, then, be little 
risk of misunderstanding if use is made here of a 
brilliant section of a very remarkable work^, written 
by a colleague and a friend, for bringing into clearer 
relief the central doctrine, of this, so very different, 
book. 

Professor Nunn tells us that his "purpose is to 
reassert the claim of Individuality to be regarded as 
the supreme educational end, and to protect that ideal 
against both the misprision of its critics and the 
incautious advocacy of some of its friends." We have 
urged, on the other side, that though individuality 
may be an educational end, it is an end which can 
only be attained by those who seek another and a 
larger end. "Individuality," to be sure, is a hard 
word, yet it is employed in a more intelligible and 
more consistent sense in this work than in many 
others, and there can be no doubt that the author 
has deserved and won much approval. His argument, 
strong and flexible, is always urged with manifest 
sincerity of conviction, and often with a judicious 
caution. In the passage already quoted, if it is main- 
tained that some critics misprise the ideal of indi- 
viduality, it is allowed that some of its friends are 

1 T. P. Nunn, Education, its Data and First Principles. (Arnold, 
1920.) 



IX] WORK AND PLAY 115 

incautious. The "misprision " is due, perhaps, in part 
to the doubt in which readers are involved as to what 
the claim for Individuality really means: the very 
fairness with which in this work it is for the most 
part upheld makes them wonder whether everything 
that they would set over against that claim is not 
generously granted. Yet for plain persons the word 
suggests that when we set up a claim for Individuality, 
you and I and any other man desires each one of us 
to "be himself," to "go his own way," and if he is to 
make a contribution to the general welfare of society 
to make such contribution as he himself thinks fit, 
and to make it as he chooses. This sense of the word, 
seems to be adopted in the chapters entitled "Play" 
and ' ' The Play- Way in Education . " In these chapters 
much, if not all, the reserve which marks other parts 
of the work is abandoned ; we shall therefore consider 
them, in the hope either of reveahng the grounds of 
disagreement or of establishing the terms of a re- 
conciliation. The importance which their author gives 
to the conception of Play, and for the purpose of this 
argument, to his interpretation of it may be learnt 
from his own words: "it is hardly extravagant to say 
that in the understanding of play lies the key to most 
of the practical problems of education." 

The spirit of play, we are informed, is intangible 
and elusive. It is also very generous, for, though the 
alert and unwearying writer tries hard in the course 
of nearly forty pages to put his hand on it, it escapes 
him for all his ingenuity ; and with a smile, if not with 
laughter to be heard by mortal ears, proves that he 



ii6 WORK AND PLAY [ch. 

is right. Intangible and elusive, yet play is known 
well enough by common folk, who, agreeing, "that 
it is impossible to maintain a psychological antithesis 
between play and work^," are satisfied that there is 
an ethical, a practical difference between the two. 

"An agent," Dr Nunn says, "thinks of his activity 
as play if he can take it up or lay it down at choice 
or vary at will the conditions of its exercise ; he thinks 
of it as work if it is imposed on him by unavoidable 
necessity, or if he is held to it by a sense of duty or 
vocation." This is "the basis of the limited validity 
which we grant to the antithesis between play and 
work." Dr Nunn says that we can readily understand 
the difference by analysing any activity, "for ex- 
ample, eating one's dinner." We must eat; here is 
necessity ; but is a man at work when he is eating his 
dinner? Not in the language of the vulgar. But, even 
if eating dinner is "work," it must be granted that 
some people, "a fortunate minority of us," have 
freedom, not indeed complete but "considerable," in 
choosing what we shall eat and how and where we 
shall eat it ; and with this freedom we may presumably 
either change the "work" of eating into play or at 
least pleasantly and decently disguise it. 

We cannot, to be sure, often eat foods and drink 
hquors for which we cannot pay, or more than once 
take poisons; yet if our freedom is thus sadly limited 
we may make the best of what we have. We may, 
an occasion, go out to a fashionable restaurant, and, 

1 Bradley, "On Floating Ideas and the Imaginary," Mind, 
N.S. No. 60; cited by Nunn <?*. cit. p. 76. 



IX] WORK AND PLAY 117 

if the occasion were appropriate, our expedition and 
our meal might justly be called a play; but if we elect 
"a chop at home," much as we may ordinarily prefer 
that to the most splendid banquet, can we be said 
to "play" as we eat that nourishing and now, alas! 
too rare food? No ! We do not play with a mutton 
chop — we eat it, devour it, wolf it; we cannot play 
with it. Is it to be said that we " toy " with a mutton 
chop? The word is unfamiliar in this use; but, if we 
even so employed it, we should mean that we did not 
eat the chop, owning ourselves unequal to its potency 
or insensitive to its rich appeal. But why might the 
restaurant dinner be play? The reason is plain: be- 
cause we might go to it "for fun "? Why could not the 
"chop at home" be play? Because we cannot eat a 
chop " for fun " ; the feat is not recorded of men. The 
constraint under which we eat is, we are told, external 
and ultimate. Ultimate, perhaps; but is it external? 
We are not apt to regard ourselves, as the victims of 
"forcible feeding," when we eat because we are 
hungry. The illustration is distressing: let us very 
quickly abandon it. And the text is the main thing, 
the positive, though guarded statement, that there is 
a "limited validity" in the "antithesis between play 
and work." 

The difference may be put thus: We say " I must," 
when we are talking about work; we say " I need not, 
but I will," when we are talking about play. But 
Dr Nunn is eager to bring the spirit of play into all 
that we do. He has very clearly and forcibly used an 
argument which is frequently attempted by less 



ii8 WORK AND PLAY [ch. 

adroit writers, and by thinkers who lack his courage 
and his perception. Not the least of the merits of 
this book is the orderly contribution made by each 
part to the main thesis, and the chapters which deal 
with play are subservient to the general argument. 
But we are disposed to think that the accomplished 
and learned author might have come nearer to the 
truth if in treating play he had taken the risk of being 
inconsistent with his general theory, and that if he 
had taken the risk he would have abandoned the 
theory itself. For we are not ready to accept Indivi- 
duality as the "supreme educational end," or to 
suppose that the end can be stated in any simple 
word or formula. The end when justly stated must also 
be illogically stated; it must be as various and as 
intolerant of a strict definition as life itself. To seek 
individuality is good, but to lose it is good; to yield 
to society and to defy society are both proper tasks 
for men, who must be in the world and yet not of it ; 
who must be themselves, but can only discover them- 
selves by finding other selves than their own; who 
must die in order to live. It is granted, indeed, that 
the individual must make his contribution to the 
general welfare of the Society, the world, in which 
he lives; but the admission is followed by the claim 
that he must be free to make it as he chooses, in the 
form which he elects; and this is a freedom which the 
world cannot grant, because it would be a freedom 
without meaning. 

There is no gainsaying the statement that play is 
important ; but when we ask what play is our coun- 



IX] WORK AND PLAY 119 

sellers are prone to fail us. They speak of its charac- 
teristics; or they look with eyes not undimmed by 
kindly tears upon the activities of early childhood 
and declare that these are plays and are prompted 
and inspired by the spirit of play. What are these 
characteristics? One is said to be spontaneity; 
another is joy. What we do of our own accord and 
with delight is play. Or, again, if in any activity we 
seek nothing else, nothing beyond and outside the 
activity itself, then, it is said, we are at play. And 
once more we are told that if, though there be an end 
proposed, that end is a "make-believe" and different 
from the " real " ends of ordinary life, then the activity 
in which we seek this pretended end is play. Now we 
may recognise these characteristics, and may even 
hasten to say that they are characteristics of play; 
but we are not satisfied that they are the differentiae 
of play: indeed, quite clearly and beyond dispute, 
these are the characteristics of some activities which 
we also call "work." Or is it to be believed that we 
never work "spontaneously," never "with joy"; that 
no work is ever an end in itself ; that in work we never 
set before ourselves a "make-believe" or pretended 
end? What advance or discovery has ever been made 
except by men who framed and tested a hypothesis 
which was untrue to the world of fact and science as 
at that moment accepted? Was the hypothesis justi- 
fied? Then the "real" world was real no longer; old 
things were passed away and behold all things were 
new. The very passion with which many good 
people now bid us bring the spirit of play into work 



120 WORK AND PLAY [ch. 

proves them to be almost on our side. They long 
to make work one with play; we reply that, that 
though work is not play, the characteristics which 
they find in play have always been present in all work 
which is not bondsmen's work; but we hold that play 
has other notes which they have not remarked, and 
work qualities different from those of play in addition 
to those which it shares with play. 

The apologists of play admit and even proclaim 
that play is not work, and we must try to find out 
what is the difference between them. We are not 
much helped by the very instructive observations 
which they make about the function of play, its use 
for us. It may well be true that the performance of 
certain activities, common in the infancy and child- 
hood of other animals and of human creatures, gives 
admirable and necessary practice for repeating these 
activities or some of them in later, mature, life. In 
infancy, or childhood, it is argued, young creatures 
make experiments upon themselves and upon the 
world, upon their own varied and growing powers 
and upon the answering and resistant or encouraging 
forces of the world; they train themselves to agility, 
to speed, to endurance. They mimic the serious occu- 
pations of their parents, they recall in strange antics 
the feats of distant ancestors, perhaps they hit upon 
untried and certainly exhibit unrecorded modes of 
exercise. The puppy pursues his innocent and un- 
docked tail; the boy throws and catches a ball, he 
fights little battles that tax his strength, he hunts, he 
builds; his sister is his plajnuate and his rival, and 



IX] WORK AND PLAY 121 

his despair; she too has her occupations, she nurses 
her doll, she minds her fancy-built home. The boy 
is preparing himself, all unconsciously, for manhood ; 
the girl, for womanhood. All this is a beautiful and 
engaging spectacle for philosophic middle-age. Pro- 
fessor Nunn tells us that we have here a "biological 
device," he speaks of Nature as a person, and because 
Nature (like play) is elusive he must call nature 
"she": she has devices, the "devices" of play for 
building up the young, fashioning them for what will 
presently befall, getting them ready for the burden 
of life. It is a theme for poets, and indeed they have 
made it very much their own, and given it back to 
the plain prosaic world embellished by their art. 

But we have two questions to ask — Are all the 
activities of infancy and childhood play? Or are we 
to say that some are play and others not? There is 
eating, for example. In eating, we conceive, children 
and other young creatures are preparing themselves 
for the stress and strain of after years. Is eating play? 
It is surely as natural and necessary as hunting, 
fighting, building, doll-nursing. And sleep? Is this 
play? Probably no one will be found to claim eating, 
drinking, and sleeping as part of the play of children 
and other young creatures. These things, it will be 
said, they must do : they cannot help themselves. Is 
play, then, the general name for their waking ac- 
tivities other than eating and drinking? But it may 
quite well be said, and indeed has been stated on high 
authority, that a boy can no more help running after 
a ball or pursuing another boy than a kitten can 



122 WORK AND PLAY [ch. 

help pouncing upon a reel of cotton drawn before it. 
Is a chicken then at play when it pecks on the ground 
for seed? No, it is replied, the chicken is not at play, 
because already it is independent of its parents; it is 
earning its living, it is depending on its own efforts 
for a livelihood. How low down in the animal scale 
may we go and still find play? Here is an interesting 
question the answer to which might help us to discover 
the meaning of play, but we cannot directly pursue 
this problem. 

The distinction between the "work" of the chicken 
and the "play" of the kitten, the puppy or the child 
is drawn by those who make use of it to help their 
argument that play is free, a proof and exhibition of 
spontaneity. But if those creatures cannot help 
"playing," where is the freedom, where the spon- 
taneity? We have used these two words "freedom" 
and "spontaneity" as if they were equivalent, and so 
indeed they are often used to the darkening of counsel. 
A spontaneous action may perhaps be described as 
one which results from the loosening of some spring 
within the creature that does the action, though even 
so we are left to guess what it is that releases the 
spring and why. But a free action is something 
much more important than this, something, at 
any rate, very different. A free action is an 
action selected from alternatives. Accordingly, if 
a boy cannot help himself from adopting this or 
that mode of play, whichever it is that he adopts, 
he is not free. To this question we shall presently 
come back. 



IX] WORK AND PLAY 123 

It is worth while at this point to observe that the 
freedom which is postulated for children (and other 
creatures) in their play has very narrow limits; the 
conditions in which play is conducted are indeed so 
clear, so stringent, and (quite apart from those which 
are drawn by the native abilities or disabilities of the 
player) drawn so firmly by forces not his own, traced 
we may say by a will not his own, that, though we 
may like to keep the word, we are constrained to 
admit that this freedom is a very little thing. The 
epigram, quoted with approval warmer than it de- 
serves, that we are young so long as we play rather 
than we' play so long as we are young, serves our 
purpose. For what is this youthfulness? It is a state 
in which we depend for maintenance and protection 
upon other people. Now there are no names for 
constraint more apt that these names; there is no 
constraint more rigid than that which is enforced by 
maintenance and protection. No doubt, while main- 
tenance and protection are afforded to it, the young 
creature may accumulate a store of superfluous energy, 
but this energy is superfluous for self-maintenance 
and self-protection because maintenance and pro- 
tection are provided from without. And if one of the 
principal purposes sought or ends achieved by this 
external maintenance and protection is the safe- 
guarding of the energy of the young creature against 
its own extravagance and folly, another principal end 
is the safe-guarding of the elder generation, the 
society into which the new comer is arrived, from the 
depredation, the extravagant misuse to which the 



124 WORK AND PLAY [ch. ix 

young will, unless they are severely limited, subject 
their elders. 

And we cannot forget that the freedom of any 
young creature is closely hedged about by the liberties 
of other young creatures, who may even defy and 
incontinently transgress the boundaries of their own 
making or made by others which confront them. 

If play has the characteristics which its modern 
advocates so painfully claim for it, then it is clear 
that infancy and early childhood are periods in which 
we did not play. For there is no play except in con- 
tradistinction to work . To say this is not to disparage 
either work or play or to maintain that we must 
choose between them, cleaving to the one and aban- 
doning the other; we must take both, one at a time, 
for the ordinary dull days when we are at that low 
level which we call our average height, but both to- 
gether when we rise, as sometimes we all rise, to a 
serener altitude. But there is a period apparently 
when the distinction, the difference between work and 
play has not yet been apprehended, and it would 
seem to be clear that until the distinction is appre- 
hended work and play do not yet exist — in other 
words, the activities in which we engage do not yet 
deserve either the name of work or the name of play. 



CHAPTER X 
ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 

SOME support for the conclusion which we have 
now reached may be got from Professor Drever^. 
He tells us that the "work tendency" begins to show 
itself at about the age of seven. A contrast, in fact 
begins to make itself felt between what must be and 
what may be. The moment at which this discovery 
is made is a critical moment. It involves an analysis 
of the simple, single, world of infancy into two parts, 
which seem to break away from one another so com- 
pletely as to become two worlds, sometimes remote 
one from the other, and yet sometimes menacingly 
near. And with the violent shock of a world breaking 
in twain comes the more cruel because more intimate 
discovery that the happy and hitherto thoughtless, 
inhabitant of a single and pleasant universe is himself 
divided by the sharp edge of thought which has cut 
his world in two. The main business of the rest of 
life consists in solving the problem which is thus 
created. If the problem is regarded merely as a paper 
puzzle it may be said that three possibilities offer 
themselves for trial. Either we must live in the world 
of work, or we must live in the world of play, or we 
must reconcile two worlds, parts of a broken world, 
and bring them into a fresh unity. But the problem 
is not a paper puzzle for the exercise of a logical 

^ Instinct in Man, p. 229. 



126 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

ingenuity; it is a practical problem, and in fact we 
know that there is only one solution, namely, the 
last, that of reuniting and so reinterpreting the 
sundered parts of the primitive or childish universe. 
Some fanatics make the attempt to live for play, 
just as other fanatics not less dangerous to themselves 
and to their neighbours make the attempt to live for 
work. Fanatics of both sorts seek to sunder and 
keep separate partners whom God has joined, and 
whose union, depending as all vital unions do upon 
difference, has been apparently shattered by the 
thought which has discovered this difference. Upon 
those who will play and do nothing but play, the 
notion, the idea of work breaks, the idea of necessity, 
of compulsion, of right; upon these who will work 
and do nothing but work, the notion of play, the idea 
of it, sheds a rare but disconcerting ray, with the 
effect of penetrating their hearts with the shaft of 
discontent. Much as they may have won by their 
zeal for play or for work, the}/ have ruined, these 
partisans, the one thing needful, and that is the re- 
constructed unity of themselves and of their world. 
We have used the words "reconstructed unity," and 
they may have served our purpose decently well ; yet 
it is necessary to remember that the unity, the whole- 
ness, which is "reconstructed" is not the same as the 
unity which has been dissolved by thought, by appre- 
ciation, by conscious enquiry. Rather it should be 
said that unity is at once created and threatened by 
the analysis which discovers divers elements in what 
was an undiscriminated, undifferentiated whole. In- 



x] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 127 

fancy has a wholeness for us older persons to admire 
or to deplore; but there is no wholeness for an eye 
which cannot perceive it. And when the eye learns to 
perceive unity, the moment is come for it to discover 
variety, discrepancy, contrariety, the elements of 
strife as well as the elements of concord. 

So an untrained ear may catch and delight to hold 
a sound which gives it an unintelligent pleasure ; but 
a trained ear hears not a sound, but a harmony of 
concerted sounds, and perceives the whole which they 
compose because it appreciates the several different 
sounds of which that total consists. It is then legiti- 
mate to say that the trained ear creates the harmony 
which it perceives, and that for the untrained ear 
the unity which, in default of better and more exact 
language, we said that it apprehended did not really 
exist. 

The passage in Professor Drever's book to which 
reference has already been made calls for further 
notice. When he speaks of the work tendency he con- 
trasts it with the tendency towards experimentation. 
Experimentation is in his view one of the elements of 
play — when we experiment we make trial in this way 
or that of the world to see what will happen; when 
we work we act upon the world expecting a result for 
our action. "The interest in experimentation is 
satisfied with whatever result emerges, while in the 
case of ' work ' the result which emerges is not satis- 
factory unless it is the result aimed at, or sufficiently 
approximating to that to be taken for it by the child. 
Though the 'work' tendency may therefore be dis- 



128 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

tinguished from instinctive experimentation it may 
also be regarded as a development from it. And 
experimentation certainly co-operates in rendering 
results, of little significance in themselves, sufficiently 
interesting as results and as the results intended to 
stimulate long and strenuous effort," 

Aristotle tells us that a child cannot be truly 
happy. The conditions of true happiness a child 
cannot master, its elements he cannot grasp and keep 
together. It may be said not less justly that a child 
cannot truly play, until he has discovered the meaning 
of work and conceived a desire for it. To see what 
will happen is a pleasure which cannot be enjoyed 
by a person who cannot distinguish between hap- 
pening and the result of intention, the effect of con- 
sidered and purposive action. The epigram "we are 
young as long as we play" is misleading: it would be 
better to say that we cannot begin to play until we 
have learned to work. The earliest distinction be- 
tween work and play — a distinction like others which, 
as we shall have to note, must be caught up into a 
harmony or unity — is then the distinction between 
"must " and "may." " I must do this because I must 
achieve that " is what we say to ourselves about work. 
"I may do, I have leisure for doing, I can afford to 
do that and risk the consequences or pay the bill" is 
what we say to ourselves about play. And we say 
neither of these things to ourselves during that period, 
long or short, in which childhood is quite erroneously 
said to disport itself. There would indeed be some 
excuse for those who should pretend that that period 



X] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 129 

of childhood is a period of unbroken work. No one 
can have failed to remark the apparent seriousness 
with which young children " play." They " play " with 
their fingers and their toes with a solemnity with 
which great statesman may handle the destinies of 
empires or with which aldermen eat their dinners. 
But they are not really "playing" at all; they are 
engaged in a process as vitally important as that of 
eating and drinking. A healthy infant takes his milk 
with a look of absorption which would suggest that 
the whole world were offering him a teat and that his 
life depended on sucking it dry. His look does not 
belie the fact, and yet the plain and magnificent fact 
may elude us who, having left the happy confines of 
terrestrial infancy, have yet not made our way, 
infants a second time, into the kingdom of Heaven. 
The fact is indeed simple enough, but, since infancy 
has no title, and pretends none, to speech, speech 
cannot describe it, without formal contradiction. The 
infant, then, who absorbs the world, his world, has 
no name for it and does not distinguish it from him- 
self. To begin with, the world, his world, is a com- 
posite whole, himself and his mother's breast ; but he 
has neither desire nor power to analyse this total. 
Already he has other needs than the need of food, 
but even these he cannot at first distinguish. The 
" world " which is his nourishment is also his warmth, 
his support, his waking, his sleeping, his ever3^hing:. 
in a word, it is himself. 

But presently that world exhibits itself to him 
by withdrawing itself for a space, for a time, and 



130 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

he discovers it by its comparative absence, by its 
remoteness. Then he discovers himself, and the dis- 
covery is a series of discoveries. Food, warmth, sup- 
port, waking, sleeping, all these things which were, all 
together, himself (things which we, looking at him 
from without, were ready to call himself and his world, 
distinguishing between them) now present themselves 
in succession ; he is cold and wants — warmth ; he is 
falling and wants — support; he wakes and wants — 
company; he sleeps and wants — the enfolding arm. 
He is not suffered to want long; but he must be 
suffered to want long enough; there must be an 
interval, a pause, a vacancy; in that interval he has 
the leisure and the necessity to find himself; that 
vacancy he fills with himself. But the self which he 
fashions, he fashions from materials, of which he now 
becomes conscious; he is a creature, who hungers, 
who thinks, who craves so many several things. The 
world stands over against him; it is the source, the 
varied and fruitful source from which he may satisfy 
these varied and exigent needs. Again our grown-up 
language leads us astray. We said the child "dis- 
covers himself." At the moment, a few lines higher, 
that was legitimate ; but now we must rather say that 
he discovers several selves, a hungering self, a thirsting 
self, and others. And who is it that makes that dis- 
covery; who is he? The hungering self, with which 
he is, or to us and to himself seems to be identified, 
ceases to urge its claim when hunger is satisfied, and 
with its claim withdraws (I do not say cancels or 
annihilates) itself; the thirsting self appears and, 



x] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 131 

when thirst is quenched, retreats; the other selves 
present and call away themselves. And he remains ; 
but himself he does not see ; of himself he very slowly 
becomes aware ; and he becomes aware of himself as 
we, older people, become aware of silence when voices 
are hushed, or of darkness, when light is quenched, 
or of sound when silence is cleft to its core, or of light 
when darkness is gathered up, as a veil, with in- 
visible hands. 

That permanent remainder that eternal opposite, 
that background upon which rival selves show them- 
selves, and which while they hold the stage they blot 
out — that is he. "Blot out," I said; it is an ink- 
stained word. For the child, the permanent self is not 
blotted out by the recurrent selves; it is dazzled out 
by them, it is out-coloured by them, while they 
exercise their brief and bright dominion; and they 
recur so soon, and they interchange so quickly, that 
the intervals between the scenes and acts are very 
little noticed, or, if they are prolonged, sleep drops 
like a curtain not upon the spectacle, but upon the 
spectator's soul. Yet intervals there are, how rare 
and brief soever; and sleep's curtain falls sometimes 
too slowly, and the spectator looking to see the per- 
forming selves sees his own eyes reflected from a world 
empty but for them. It is a vision he cannot yet 
endure; and he buries his head in his mother's breast, 
he grasps his father's hand; soon the curtain drops 
and sleep shuts the senses up, or half-releases them 
to act upon the twilit stage of dreams, phantom 
shadow dreams to the drowsing self. "I dreamed," 



132 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

the child announces when he wakes; or "You were 
dreaming" his mother tells him "I" "You"; the 
problem remains. Who is this spectator? 

Once again, we must attempt to make the language 
which we have used more accurate, and to do this 
we must enquire more closely into the conditions in 
which it may be properly used. The truth is that the 
chUd never becomes the spectator of his selves (the 
hungering, thirsting, laughing, crying, selves) until he 
has had that experience which we tried just now to 
describe, the experience of seeing, if but for a moment, 
his self. The result of that vision is to make him more 
than a spectator: it makes him a critic, a judge. 
Henceforth he learns to arrange his selves in an order 
of importance and preference ; he learns at the same 
time to relate his several selves to the world or the 
worlds in which he lives. And the main results of 
his study are that he finds that some of his selves 
are more valuable and necessary to himself than 
others, which may, however, be on occasion more 
attractive ; he finds, further, that some of his selves 
are more valuable and necessary than the rest to the 
people with whom he has to live; that some of his 
selves may be very pleasant to these people, but 
pleasant upon some occasions and not on all; that 
some again of his selves are unpleasant to these 
people, who show their disapproval with marked and 
increasing severity; and that yet others are tolerated, 
because neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but in- 
different. 

He learns a scale or scales of values. To begin with. 



x] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 133 

his estimates are hard and inelastic ; he contrasts too 
sharply what is necessary with what is pleasant, 
faihng to remark the pleasantness of much that is 
necessary, and the necessary character of much that 
is pleasant. He contrasts too sharply what is pleasant 
to himself with what is pleasant to other people, or 
what is applauded by them or merely suffered by 
them, or what they will on no condition permit. He 
makes a hundred mistakes; there is no rule to guide 
him unerringly; but in the main he is right; he learns 
that for his own sake and for his neighbours some 
things must be, other things may be, and others 
again must not and may not. In learning to make 
these estimates of value, it is evident that he is also 
learning to make estimates of occasions also. There 
is a time for this, and another time for that, and no 
time at all for something else. He finds once more, 
that the occasions for some of the things he has to do 
{i.e. for the manifestations of some of his selves) are 
frequent or prolonged or both ; and that the occasions 
for other things that he is disposed to do are rare or 
short or both. And he may too readily make a hard 
and a partly false distinction between those things 
which he has to do and those things which he is dis- 
posed to do. He may not see that he is sometimes 
disposed to do the things that he has to do (though 
he may not be disposed to do them when he is con- 
strained by the world to do them) ; he may even fail to 
see that he has to do some of the things which he is 
disposed to do (that his world would insist upon his 
doing those things if he neglected them, though it is 



134 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

unwilling for him to do them so often or for so long 
a time as he would, in an unfettered choice, elect) . 

He thus becomes an economist of time and of 
opportunity; he lays by a reserve, he begins as it 
were to bank his time and his opportunity; he builds 
up a margin. Here is real experimentation. He has 
learned that certain results follow certain actions, and 
that certain results are peremptorily demanded both by 
himself and by his world ; but, when he has wraught 
those results, his day is not over. He has time and 
strength left, and in that time and with that strength 
he can not only achieve other results to which he 
knows the road, the road namely of actions which he 
has frequently repeated, but can attempt actions in 
this direction and in that, feeling his way cautiously 
or perhaps recklessly, moving along roads hitherto 
untried. But experiments of this kind are in value 
and character quite different from those others which 
he made before he knew either that certain actions 
have certain results or that he himself and his world 
demand those results. He may delight, and in general 
he does delight, in doing the known actions which 
bring known results; but he must do them whether 
he delights in them or not at the time when he and 
his world call for them to be done. 

Virtue is its own reward ; but virtue expresses itself 
in virtuous actions; or, if "action" is too gross and 
material a word, let us then say, in virtuous conduct, 
and, if conduct is too prosaic and offers itself too 
readily to external measurement and appraisal, then 
we may substitute for it "activity," which we are 



X] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 135 

told may be inward or outward. The distinction is for 
our present purpose meaningless. If virtue be a 
principle, a moving force, then it makes for a result. 
It is not pedantic to note a difference between a good 
intention and a good performance. The world cannot 
command a good intention from children or for that 
matter from adult citizens ; it can and does command 
certain good performances. Aristotle rightly said that 
a man does not deserve to be called grammatical 
merely .because what he writes and speaks is gram- 
matical: more than this is required, he must write 
and speak in a grammatical spirit. But we do not 
bid children write and speak in a grammatical spirit ; 
we insist by precept, aided by example, and enforced 
by the very real sanction of not being understood, 
upon grammatical forms of writing and of speech. 
Out of the abundance of practice rules may be drawn, 
general maxims or regulations, and from these later 
the spirit of grammar may be evoked by some but 
probably not by all persons who have learned to use 
a language with correctness. 

We need not deny that the mistakes of children are 
often pretty, and sometimes even useful to themselves 
as well as to the psychologists whose number appears 
to be rapidly increasing in the world; we may even 
admit that the mistakes and not less the successful 
attempts of children in the difficult exercise of speech 
may be called experiments, trials designed at one 
stage to discover what effect, if any, certain words 
and groupings of words will have upon the listeners, 
and, at another stage, if the result of the experiment 



136 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

has gratified those who made it, to discover whether 
these or those words or groupings of words repeated 
will bring again a desired effect. There is an earlier 
stage at which their words and wordless sounds are 
designed without reference to any other listeners, but 
for the gratification and easement of the speakers 
themselves, and a still earlier when sounds and the 
earliest words are uttered with little if any more 
intention than a sneeze or a cough upon the appro- 
priate stimulus. 

Now children must pass through these stages; they 
enjoy the passage, if it is not too much prolonged; 
older persons and parents are contented and perhaps 
proud witnesses of their children's passage through 
these stages, again upon the condition that they are 
not prolonged unduly; and it is to save trouble to 
themselves and their children that parents either 
directly or through the agency of other (and perhaps 
better equipped) adults teach them to talk and in 
good time to write. In every family every child in his 
"experiments" hits upon new modes of expression 
which are hailed with pious joy by their parents; 
but let the family be numerous and the parents com- 
fortably honest, and they will tell each other, the 
contented father and the contented mother, that the 
new mode of their youngest reminds them of the mode 
now (thank God ! they sigh) abandoned by their eldest 
chUd. This originality, they remark, must be in the 
family. And they treasure this belief jealously and 
stoutly maintain it, though every other father and 
every other mother of their acquaintance proclaim 



x] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 137 

the same originality for every other brood of children, 
and maintain it with a conviction which matches 
their own. Parents are now beginning to read the 
books of experimental psychologists and of teachers, 
who believe that children can teach themselves. When 
they have read in those works that the children of 
north and south, east and west, poor children, rich 
children, fair and dark, tall and short, will betray the 
originality, the inventiveness of their own, they will 
still, in face of all evidence, beheve that there is some- 
thing more original in the originality of their John and 
their Jemima; perhaps they will call it aboriginal, 
perhaps not. 

We all make exceptions in favour of our own 
children and our own pupils. But surveying the chil- 
dren and the pupils of other folk we shall soon be 
compelled to see and to confess that there is a 
wonderful sameness in their originality, and that the 
range of their experiments is limited. The field of 
their exploration is circumscribed and hedged about : 
its area is fixed by two main determinant forces. The 
first is the weakness of the children themselves; their 
pretty playful expeditions and excursions are brought 
to a quick end by their inability to travel far from 
their base ; they soon become tired and frightened and 
hurry home; the second is the foresight of their 
parents, who will not suffer them, when their untried 
courage would tempt them further, to go beyond the 
paddock, to overleap the fences. Often the parents 
are wrong in making the paddock too small, often in 
making the fences too stiff and too high. But in 



138 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

general they are right. They permit, they encourage, 
experiments within safe hmits, experiments which 
may be conducted without too much cost to the 
children and to themselves. It is because the children 
enjoy a general safety and are protected as well as 
limited by the conditions set for them that they 
exhibit the confidence which their elders observe. 
Where this general safety is less complete we are 
ready to deplore the misfortune of the children and 
to decry the negligence of their parents. There is 
nothing which moves our pity so readily as the spec- 
tacle of children nervous and apprehensive of danger 
because they cannot trust a protection supplied to 
them by the providence of their elders. 

Most children, we are fain to believe, can trust 
their elders; they climb, they fall; they fall as fear- 
lessly as they climb, because they are sure enough 
that they will not be allowed to fall too heavily or 
too hard. They climb the same trees again and again; 
they fall frequently, until at last they have learnt to 
fall on their feet. These experiments they make at 
will, though within a limited range; there are other 
activities, which may not improperly be called ex- 
periments, to which they are urged and in which they 
are guided by their elders. A young student in a 
chemical laboratory claims that he is performing an 
experiment when into a test tube containing a specified 
quantity of a he pours a specified quantity of 6. The 
result of adding « to 6 he may very likely have been 
told beforehand ; he is verifying for himself what his 
teachers have long ago established by earlier experi- 



X] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 139 

ments, which themselves may have been of the nature 
rather of verification than of discovery. Long ago 
perhaps either genius or accident first combined a 
and h. Now many activities of children, which we 
sometimes call free, have the freedom of genius or of 
accident, but of genius or accident insured against 
too heavy a cost. They are experiments conducted 
as it were under a guarantee; and it must be re- 
membered that no rational guarantor accepts un- 
limited responsibility. But there are other activities 
in which children engage, not unwillingly, and yet 
under compulsion, and these also may be called ex- 
periments in as much as, when the children first 
engage in them, they are unable to guess or with 
certainty to foretell the consequences. The conse- 
quences are known perfectly or for practical purposes 
sufficiently well by their parents and teachers, though 
they are not always explained in advance to the 
children, who may have the lesson of surprise, when 
that lesson has been long since learned by their elders. 
If a student who has been told to add so much, a 
specified quantity, of a to so much, a specified quan- 
tity, of h, under certain conditions, produces not c 
but z, his teacher is, I believe, far more likely to 
conclude that the student has made a mistake in his 
measurements, or in his estimate of the conditions 
in which the "experiment" should be made than to 
congratulate the student in having made a discovery. 
And the teacher will, I believe, cause the student to 
make the same experiment over and over again, not 
in the expectation, though not ruling out the possi- 



140 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [cH. 

bility, of the student's finding out some new thing, 
but with the intention of making the student accurate 
in manipulation, in observation, and in recording 
what he has done and seen. This is exactly our pro- 
cedure, and this is our purpose in ordering and direct- 
ing activities of children and young people in lessons 
which are not ordinarily called scientific, and in the 
affairs of every-day life. Certain results, known by us 
to be produced by certain causes operating in certain 
conditions, are desired by us for ourselves and for them. 
Of these results we may agree that some are less 
important than others; but of some of them we shall 
say that they are essential and necessary, and there- 
fore that the processes by which they are attained 
must be performed with a rigorous accuracy. Accuracy 
children may acquire by repetition, which is indeed 
not uncongenial to them. They love to play their old 
games without change; they are strongly conser- 
vative ; they hate innovation, though it need hardly 
be remarked that the objects of their conservative 
devotion change with successive periods of their de- 
velopment in relative importance, and that the new 
thing which they hate to-day may to-morrow become 
an object of curiosity, and later either of indifference 
or of affection. By doing over and over again the 
things they want to do they learn to do them perfectly, 
and then to do them thoughtlessly, and so pass on to 
a stage at which they may be content to omit them 
altogether, but to omit them because some new things, 
some fresh activities have come to take the place of 
the old in their minds. 



X] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 141 

Now the vacant place is made by the mechanical 
perfection with which old processes have come to be 
performed. To this subject we shall soon revert. We 
have first to emphasise afresh a distinction which has 
been already drawn. It is this : some of the activities 
in which by repetition they freely attain perfection 
the world permits; some of the activities in which 
they are bound to attain perfection the world de- 
mands. The first fall within the region of may, the 
second fall within the region of must. It is when 
children begin to appreciate this distinction that they 
begin to perceive the distinction between work and 
play, and they know neither work nor play till they 
know at least that there is a difference between the 
two, though they may not be able in clear language 
to state what it is. The process of doing anything 
may be called a technique, but the word is applied 
more correctly, though not exclusively, to the process 
of doing anything which can be called a business, a 
craft, or an art. The analogy would not be violently 
disputed, but most persons would feel that an analogy 
was being used by a man who should speak of the 
technique of a game. A person who has mastered a 
technique has learnt perfectly to perform the several 
successive stages of a process. And he has reached 
perfection, as we say (very truly), when he can do 
what has to be done without thinking. He can now 
do it with a minimum of trouble, and his saving, his 
economy, is a saving, an economy of mental or physical 
labour. 

But to have saved labour and to have saved time 



142 ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION [ch. 

is to have made leisure and to possess the energy 
with which to enjoy and use it. There are two ways 
in which we use leisure; we use it partly for doing 
other things than those which we are obliged to do; 
and we use it for turning to fresh purposes the things 
which we are constrained to do. " Work first and play 
afterwards" is a sound maxim; "Work while you 
work and play while you play" is another equally 
sound. "He is the freeman whom the truth makes 
free" is a third. For man there is no truth except 
truth of workmanship, the truth which he wins by 
toil. A man who has made a wheel which runs true, 
or has got some dovetailing true, or has compacted 
an argument and made it true, has achieved a freedom. 
He is then entitled to play. A man who can form 
letters with a pen easily and perfectly has achieved 
truth in that operation, and with it has won freedom. 
He is now entitled to play with his pen. A man who 
can speak with clearness and accuracy is now at 
liberty, he is free to pursue elegance ; he may discover 
that the elegance with which he plays gives a new 
force, a finer precision, to his language; he turns 
language which he had mastered for his former pur- 
poses to new and higher purposes. Having learnt to 
speak the common language so as to say what he 
means, he discovers style ; and he pursues and perhaps 
overtakes and captures style, with the result now at 
last of revealing what he is. 

A man who has mastered a technique is the master 
of convention. A convention is a recognition of an 
end or purpose desired and the approval of the pro- 



X] ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION 143 

cesses necessary for attaining it. There are some con- 
ventions recognised by all men ; the world insists upon 
our keeping them or imposes penalties which may not 
be shirked. One such convention, the widest in its 
application, though it may be fulfilled in various 
ways, is that if we are to live we must earn our living. 
There are other conventions of narrower range; the 
conventions of a particular nation, or group, or 
society; these we must observe if we are to be per- 
mitted to live in or to enjoy the benefits of that 
nation, group, or society. And we may without im- 
propriety say that there are conventions which a man 
makes with himself, and which he must keep if he 
is to live in that small yet important and indeed 
infinite universe which he calls himself. 

As far as a man has mastered the technique of 
living in his world, his group, and himself, he has 
mastered the convention of each; he can survey his 
world, his group, himself with eyes which leisure rests 
and makes clear. No longer a slave to himself, his 
group, or his world, he can break down the barriers 
between them, because he sees over them. But he 
must accept the conventions of each first, and acquire 
the technique of each and then claim, and use his 
freedom to criticise, to readjust, to re-interpret them. 



CHAPTER XI - 

OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 

" A ND " though it looks so simple and little is the 
£\ most potent and fertile of words. 

Let it fasten itself to anything in the world, it is 
ready to associate that thing with anything and 
ever5^hing else. 

The association which it forms may be that of mere 
addition as when field is joined to field and house to 
house. It may be that of partnership and co-operation 
as when one man allies himself with another so that 
together they may achieve a common purpose, or gets 
for himself the aid of a slave, a horse or an inanimate 
instrument to do what unaided it would be idle for 
him to attempt. Or once more it may be that of 
contrast and opposition when forces alien to or irre- 
concilable with each other are made to meet. This 
word which we call a conjunction, which seems to 
serve the plain purpose of connecting one thing with 
another, serves also to mark every kind of distinction. 
So when we maintain that there are grapes and grapes 
we may mean that there are grapes and more grapes 
of the same kind, but the slightest stress upon the 
conjunction will indicate to those who hear us that 
there are good grapes and bad, sweet and bitter, 
within our reach or inaccessible. 

Ourselves and our neighbours are linked together 
by this slender but quite indissoluble bond. Together 



CH.xi] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 145 

we and they make up the world, a world of alliances 
and affinities, of differences and varieties, of friend- 
ships and hatreds, of simple wholeness and of dis- 
tracting separations, of reconciliation and estrange- 
ment. "And" is the common sign which all these 
modes of relationship carry, it is the enigmatic mask 
which they all wear. Only one thing we may say con- 
fidently about the word; it never stands for identity, 
there can be no relationship where there is identity; 
and since significance rests upon relationship, we may 
say that identity can not be asserted in an intelligible 
and intelUgent world. 

The first remark we have to make about our neigh- 
bours is that they are other than ourselves. Our senses 
are the avenues by which we approach them and by 
which they on their part essay communication with 
us, but they are avenues which we can block or cut 
off. We see our neighbours; but rich as is the gift of 
sight, not less precious is the power to shut our eyes: 
we hear their voices, receiving delight from some and 
distress from others; but we can stop our ears; we 
smell and taste and touch, but the nostril may be 
gratified or affronted, the palate quickened or cloyed, 
the sensitive flesh soothed or tortured, and against 
the monotony of pleasure or the prolongation of pain, 
we have our remedy; we may bar the road, and shut 
ourselves up. Not completely, it may be said; escape 
is not so easy: granted, but escape may at least be 
sought, and often won; and when we find ourselves 
imprisoned in a world from which there is no outlet, 
we note the more accurately the discrepancy be- 



146 OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS [ch. 

tween it and ourselves. And there is sleep, when we 
are assailed either not at all or by other engines than 
those which the world uses upon us in our waking 
hours. And there is death, which some have con- 
ceived to be sleep, oblivion and mere nothingness, 
though most men probably regard it as a door into 
a condition of which yet we have no knowledge except 
that we are to pass through it — ^we ourselves, and so 
carry beyond its blind front the habit of distinguishing 
which has grown to be our very nature. In another 
world, we shall find ourselves, other than that world, 
and shaU be confronted once more with the problem 
of ourselves and our neighbours. Having once noted 
that our neighbours, our nearest, are other than our- 
selves — and in parenthesis it may be hinted that the 
differences are most easily and most constantly ob- 
served when the neighbours are very near — we hasten 
at a stride to the conclusion that we are better, or at 
any rate more important than, they. 

Birth is a violent estrangement by which what was 
one life becomes two; and presently, as soon as we 
declare that the still speechless infant takes notice, 
we give it to be understood that he for his part has 
given notice that he has now consciously separated 
himself from the arm which holds him, and draws 
his nourishment from an alien, because a kindred, 
soiurce. Kinship is the sharpest edge of difference, 
and is itself a discovery of which the poignant mean- 
ing reveals itself in the slow passage of the years 
bringing pain outlined by pleasure and pleasure shot 
with pain, a distinction once again, which marks 



XI] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 147 

otherness. For him, that child, the world which he 
finds set over against him is his mother; to know that 
he is near her is to know that he is himself and she 
not himself, and he learns the closeness of their union 
when he discovers for the first time that she is near 
no longer. He then distinguishes between unity, which 
would negate his own life, and that union which im- 
pl5ang separation fulfils both his and hers. But the 
word fulfil, just used, must be at once withdrawn; let 
us rather say that his awareness of alliance is a con- 
dition, one of many that are to follow, the first and 
perhaps the best, of the fulfilment of a life which is 
to bear many relations. For the terror of loneliness 
resides in the fact that the terrified spirit perceives 
that it is not alone; it has lost touch with that part 
of the world to which it had grown accustomed, and 
is looking with unfamiliar eyes into the face of an 
unfamihar world, the language of which it cannot 
understand and to which it has no intelligible lan- 
guage to utter. It is the condition of a lost soul in a 
universe to which it is not adjusted. The condition, 
intolerable both to the individual and to the world, 
is brought to an end by the establishment of new 
relations, the shock of sheer surprise being itself a 
relation, succeeded by fear, and fear by dawning hope 
and hope by trust ; terms are made, a new language 
is forged to embody them. 

The world which was once made up of himself and 
his mother from whom he drew and by whose minis- 
trations he maintains his life is now tripartite : a third 
member has been added; his world now consists of 



148 OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS [ch. 

himself, first as ever, his mother, and an undiffer- 
entiated remainder. But the analysis by which he has 
already enlarged his range is not to stop at this point : 
the experience of an immortal life is the process by 
which we analyse the remainder. And the reason is 
precisely that which we have already observed. 
Analysis is forced upon the child as upon the man, 
because he seeks to establish intelligible relationships 
with a world which he finds confronting him ; he must 
divide to rule ; he must interpret in order to use ; he 
must put a new construction, if you will an ideal 
construction, upon the confused and threatening mass 
which is over against him. From it, he sorts out his 
nurse, his father, his brothers and sisters, the servants 
of the house, his school-fellows and teachers and the 
rest. And what is the method and the result of his 
sifting? The sifting is nothing else than the con- 
tinuous discovery of the uses which these people have 
for him, and the result is in the fact that he does 
indeed make use of them. 

The result, we have said; but once again a correc- 
tion must be made, a proviso laid down. It is the 
result only for that blameless egotist whom we call 
a baby: let this result be all when he shall have grown 
even to boyhood, and if we call him an egotist we no 
longer call him blameless : but we do not call him an 
egotist, we call him a selfish pig, doing a gross in- 
justice to one of the most useful of animals. For the 
truth is that to use the world, and in especial to use 
those persons in it with whom we have clearly re- 
cognised relations, we must contribute to its uses. 



XI] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 149 

It is not a question necessarily or primarily of bar- 
gaining; the issue is deeper than that; to use is to 
participate in the life of the things or persons we use, 
and in so doing to make them or suffer them to be 
participants in ours. The pig savouring the contents 
of the swill pail is preparing himself to adorn the 
human table; he comes home to us at that critical 
hour when, secluded from the outer world, we eat the 
morning bacon in the silence of our families, he touches 
a note of pathos and of magnificence in the orchestra 
of a feast, when he lays his own head as a crown upon 
a banquet. He pays his way. The infant gives un- 
wittingly to his parents and his keepers; he provides 
them with an object of affection, a theme for conver- 
sation, and, while he makes them into a gjminasium 
for his growing muscles, is himself a vaulting-horse 
for their ambition, a field for the exercise of their 
patience ; he is at once the pledge and the test of their 
plighted love. 

But infancy stretched beyond its pretty and proper 
span (too short, we say, but long enough) is disaster 
for the child and destruction for his parents. He must 
receive more, and more special, services from them 
and from the world ; but he must give more, and give 
knowingly. He classifies the world according to the 
intimacy and the richness of the services which he 
receives from various people, and also according to 
the return which he is now able to make to them. 
The process is continued through life ; and if ever we 
say of people that we have no use for them, the sen- 
tence means that we cannot make or are unwilling 



I50 OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS [ch. 

to continue relationships with them. When childhood 
has passed away and youth has followed it and both 
are become a memory and a tradition, we find our- 
selves grown to maturity, and measure ourselves by 
the number, the variety, the wealth of the associa- 
tions which we have set up. These may be divided 
into three groups; we have our place in the general 
world, but what we give to it and receive from it we 
but dimly perceive, though the exchange is continuous 
while we live ; then we have our place in a narrower 
world within that larger whole, and here our relation- 
ships are either clearly perceived, sometimes indeed 
because we have ourselves deliberately set them up 
or because they have been forced upon us, or deeply 
and dumbly understood, when they are so long estab- 
lished and so perfect in their working that we need 
hardly think about them; and, last, we have our 
place in that most restricted circle of all, of our close 
friends or our families — a circle with the members of 
which we have both close and constant association: 
and here we have a perfectly mechanical and a me- 
chanically perfect interchange of services, and also 
that imperfect, because growing, understanding which 
gives to life its shocks and surprises. 

This contradiction at the very heart of intimacy 
may be illustrated by a simple example. We are all 
so well accustomed to the faces and the voices, to the 
attitudes, gesture, gait of our nearest kindred or our 
partners in daily work that for the most part we may 
say properly that we do not notice them; but one day 
our eye v/ill fall upon a very strange face, and the 



XI] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 151 

sharpness of our wonder will come from the fact that 
it is not a strange face at all, but that of a friend, the 
same and yet different; an unfamiliar voice will greet 
or arraign us, and we shall hear beneath the new 
note the ghost of a voice that we have heard a 
thousand times, the living dead striving with the 
deadly living; that pose, that play of the hand, 
that movement — each is new and the newness is cruel 
with the sharpened edge of a once blunted familiarity. 
The boundaries between these several worlds of our 
life's commerce are, to be sure, not hard set; they 
change — from the great general world we draw to our 
use some fresh element, or are ourselves caught up 
into untried modes of dealing with it; and on the 
other hand we may lose or allow to fall into neglect 
some of our negotiations with that inner and that 
inmost region of our nearer and nearest comrades 
and partners and friends and kindred. Our speech 
with the members of each group is, as it must needs 
be, determined by the things which we desire to say 
to them and hear from them; our conversation de- 
pends upon our needs and our power to meet an- 
swering needs which they feel and express. But what 
we are doing in all this business is to preserve our own 
life, to make good, to realise ourselves. And within 
each group we make distinctions as between the 
groups themselves, only finer and more accurate dis- 
tinctions. We seek this man because he can supply 
what we want and what we get from no other; we 
seek a second and a third and every one for the like 
reason; to appease a hunger, to quench a thirst, at 



152 OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS [CH. 

a source from which we have learnt that our appetite 
can be satisfied. True, in satisfying ourselves, we must 
make a contribution to the life of those others upon 
whose resources we draw. But need, needs, variety 
of needs, insistent, irresistible drive us to our fellows, 
and we distinguish between them according to what 
they give us. Not from all do we look to get the saipe 
things; else we were surfeited and starved at once. 
Not an equal value do we set upon the several benefits 
which we draw from our so various neighbours ; we 
have our preferences : if a choice must be made, this 
we will have and that we will forgo, and more of this 
and less of that is an everyday choice. But the choice 
is made in reference to ourselves; we classify, we 
arrange, we have an order of merit which we bestow 
or inflict upon a world which is putting us also in our 
place, exercising its own preferences and passing its 
judgment. 

In brief, an enlightened self-interest is our guide. 
We need not pause here to wonder, if our light be 
darkness, how great that darkness must be. We shall 
have occasion presently to make something more than 
an exclamation in this matter. Let us rather note 
that, while we are sorting the world and determining 
the classes into which we divide its inhabitants ac- 
cording to the nature of the supplies which we get 
from them, as a geographer colours an economic map 
showing that here coal is found and here iron, here 
wheat grows, and there are grass lands, at the same 
time we are mapping out ourselves. We have not one 
general want, but many and various wants, and we 



XI] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 153 

arrange these in an order or indeed in several orders 
of interest and importance. We need beef and we 
need books ; which shall we place higher, that element 
in us which calls for beef or that other which hungers 
for books? We may spend more time in earning our 
bodily food than in building up our libraries; and very 
likely more time in eating our meals than in reading. 
Let us set three hours a day as a reasonable time for 
eating; how many people are there who read regularly 
every day for the same number of hours? Or, once 
more, we need money and society; and we spend 
more time in getting money than in enjoying society. 
It is not contended that the length of time which we 
spend upon the pursuit of an object is the sole or even 
a principal criterion of the value which we set upon 
it in comparison with other objects; but it is one 
criterion. And, however the decision may fall, our 
argument remains the same, and it is a very simple 
one; that some of our desires we admit to be more 
imperious or nobler than others, and some of our 
objects more necessary or better than others. 

Let us now turn back for a moment from ourselves 
to the world, and we cannot deny that, when we 
classify people according to the services which they 
render, and when we without hesitation declare that 
some objects, or services rendered, are nobler and 
better or more necessary than others, we have perhaps 
unintentionally, but quite effectively, drawn class 
distinctions in the world, distinctions which mark off 
from one another the various groups with which we 
have dealings in accordance with the functions exer- 



154 OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS [ch. 

cised by each. We learnt long ago that A is an 
apothecary, 5 is a butcher or a baker, C is a candle- 
stick-maker, P is a ploughboy, T a tinker or a tailor, 
5 a soldier or a sailor. By their fruits we know them, 
that is, by their works, their services, and we may 
add their disservices, for we recall that T may be a 
thief. Now barring the last-named, who however has 
always found a foothold in the world, we realise that 
we have need of all these people, and call on them for 
services, but not on all of them for the same services; 
and regarding some of the services as more important 
or more honourable than others we arrange or at 
least are disposed to arrange the men who render the 
various services in an order of preference. 

This order is subject indeed to some changes; for 
example, the butcher and the baker may usually play 
a larger part for us than the apothecary, but on a 
rare occasion his part may be more important than 
theirs; or it may be argued that, though we less con- 
stantly need the services which he is prepared to 
render, yet the extremity of our need for them when 
the need happens to exist compels us to accord him 
a place of permanent superiority to that which they 
enjoy. Or, once more, one man may love music and 
have no interest in painting, another may be an 
amateur of pictures and have no use for music; the 
one will set the musician, the other the painter, high 
in order; the order, that is, of his own preference and 
use. Yet both will agree to set the painter and the 
musician higher in the scale of value or use than the 
dustman, though they might live without music or 



XI] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 155 

pictures and could not live without the ministrations 
of the dustman. 

If our argument has carried us so far, it must carry 
us to a further and more intimate distinction. If we 
classify other people in accordance with the uses which 
they fulfil for us, it is clear that we discover within 
ourselves a variety of appetites or elements or parts 
to which these many several persons render services. 
We regard some of our needs as higher than others, 
and so we say that some elements in ourselves are 
superior to others. We recognise a series of grades; 
we speak of our better selves, or our lower selves ; we 
distinguish between body and mind, and profess to 
set the body lower than the mind ; and when we con- 
sider either body or mind we are ready to grant 
differences, the body must be fed and clothed and 
housed and here are three several services which are 
rendered to it, and each of these may be rendered 
with or without good taste or comfort. The mind 
must be supplied with food and exercise ; it also must 
have a habitation and be clothed ; but there is good 
and ample food for the mind, or good and insufficient, 
or bad and plentiful, and the like distinctions may be 
made in regard to the mind's furniture, equipment, 
and dwelling. 

To be sure our practice may not correspond with 
our profession ; if geniality is the note which we wish 
to strike and believe we hit, it would shock us to be 
told that our god is our belly; but the accusation 
might justly be made; and if we on our side charged 
a neighbour with too devoted a care for material 



156 OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS [ch. 

things, he might reply that in the selection of his 
carpets, the ordering of his wines, the choice of his 
silver, or the cut of his clothes, he was proving him- 
self a scrupulous artist and exercising a disciplined 
imagination; and he might speak truly, though we 
should be more readily disposed to believe this if it 
were said of him than by him. 

Yet, whatever variations there may be in the order 
in which we place our fellows, and in that other but 
comparable, if not quite parallel, order in which we 
place the elements into which we divide ourselves, 
there is a tolerable fixity in our judgments and a 
tolerable agreement between our judgments and those 
of our neighbours. We agree to put some people 
above others, and are satisfied that the superior 
dignity should be marked by wealth or social con- 
sideration or both. But here we come upon a be- 
wildering problem. We saw just now that T may be 
a tinker or a tailor, and were sadly forced to own that 
T might even be a thief. Let us turn the sentence 
round; let us rather declare what we see when un- 
masked and even threateningly it turns itself round. 
We see then that the tinker, the tailor, and the thief 
are all T. They are all different, but this simple letter 
proclaims them related. They have all a common 
name ; look, it is a family name ; it is our family name ; 
they are all men. It is a bewildering, a disturbing 
thought. We may love our kindred; but we do not 
brook the claim of all men to be our kindred; their 
name is legion, and the word has its strong and ac- 
cepted association. It would seem that, in their main 



XI] OURSELVES AND OUR NEIGHBOURS 157 

quality, these human creatures whom we have been 
at the pains to sort out into classes and to arrange in 
an order, corresponding to certain familiar functions 
which they render — that in their main quality they 
are all alike, and more than that, all one. The delicate, 
discerning mind shrinks in horror from the conclusion. 
What is to be done? Cannot we restore the happy 
differences which sundered class from class, profession 
from profession, and the world in general from that 
supremely interesting and individual part of it which 
we call ourselves? May we not say that functions 
match dispositions and are indicated by nature her- 
self? We shall comfortably acquiesce in a system 
which puts one man upon the box of a brougham to 
drive through a November sleet and another man in- 
side the carriage, because we persuade ourselves that 
one is by nature a coachman and the other by nature 
a proprietor. Willing slaves of the same argument, 
we learn to tolerate ourselves; it is natural for us to 
do, to have, to be whatever we do, have and are ; we 
are what we are as clearly as our neighbours are what 
they are, and shall be content if they will keep their 
place. 



CHAPTER XII 
UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 

EVERY man, we say, has his proper place ; and we 
deserve a good place. The doctrine has much 
to commend it ; there is much of truth in it ; indeed, 
in its general statement it is quite true; but when 
it is applied numerous difficulties appear. First, as- 
suming that our own place is decently comfortable, 
we remark that our neighbours are stubbornly un- 
willing to remain in the place which we think so well 
fitted to their gifts, a place subordinate to our own; 
or, assuming on the contrary that we are ill content 
with our own place, we find that our neighbours, now 
on the other side, are hostile to any efforts which we 
may put forth for ousting them — ^planting ourselves 
in a position for which we are sure they are not fit, 
and which would admirably become us. Indeed, both 
these assumptions may be made ; envied by some, we 
envy others ; and we may compare the revolutions of 
society either to that childish game where everyone 
is moving on and on to seize a chair before another 
takes it, and which is brought to an end by the re- 
moval at last of the chairs themselves, or, more 
grossly, we may liken it to the roughest scrimmage. 
These are difficulties; but there is another. Silent, 
but irrepressible, is the protest of our hearts against 
the system: when we have forced our way to the 
sheltered corner and the comforting fire, a chill seizes 



CH.xii] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 159 

us as we reflect upon those others, so like us though 
on our own assumption so Uttle deserving of what we 
have got, who are out in the cold ; or, if we are shut 
out from the welcoming glow, we are hot with indig- 
nation at the sight, through hard transparent windows, 
of those who have won what we have sought in vain. 
There is an incurable sympathy in human nature, and 
an incurable rivalry. Those also, we cry, are men, 
flesh and blood, no worse than ourselves, as we look 
upon the starving and the destitute; those also are 
men, flesh and blood and no better than ourselves, 
as we look upon those who are sleek with prosperity. 
We clamour, or sigh, for equality. It is an amiable 
weakness; it is superb folly. Mr Chesterton provides 
an eloquent example in the beautiful essay which he 
has seen fit to entitle A Short History of England — 
a work not the less highly to be praised because the 
truth he reaches is poetic rather than merely his- 
torical, the truth, that is to say, of a creator rather 
than that of a collector; and not the less carefully 
to be scrutinised because some of his utterances have 
the deceptive glitter of half truths rather than the 
serene and simple light of plain facts. 
Let us listen to him^ 

Say the very word "Equality" in many modern coun- 
tries, and four hundred fools will leap to their feet at once 
to explain that some men can be found, on careful ex- 
amination, to be taller or handsomer than others. As if 
Dan ton had not noticed that he was taller than Robes- 
pierre, or as if Vv^ashington was not well aware that he 
was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place to expound 
^ p. 202. 



i6o UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [CH. 

a philosophy ; it will be enough to say in passing, by way 
of a parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, 
we do not mean that they all look exactly the same, we 
mean that they are absolutely equal in their one absolute 
character, as the most important thing about them. It 
may be put practically by saying that they are coins of 
a certain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may 
be put symbolically, and even mystically, by saying that 
they all bear the image of the King. And, though most 
mystical, it is also the most practical summary of equality 
that all men bear the image of the King of Kings. 

This is excellent rhetoric; we have no complaint to 
make of it ; it serves Mr Chesterton's wholly laudable 
purpose. But we must agree with him when he assures 
us that he is not expounding a philosophy, and we 
agree the more surely because we know that he calls 
people who do not agree with him very dull fellows. 
And yet we may allow ourselves to feel and to express 
surprise and regret that an author who can command 
so many analogies, similes and metaphors, and is not 
afraid to crowd upon a single page or to pack into a 
single sentence images which startle the reader by 
their apparent incongruity has here been niggardly 
and offered us but one. Indeed, if he had been more 
lavish in his illustrations, Mr Chesterton might on 
this occasion have been more philosophical. 

Let us repeat, with his main contention we agree ; 
we are wholly of his opinion ; but for practical guidance 
he leaves us sadly to seek. Pennies have a certain 
value; but have men? And, if they have, surely it 
is determined not only by the superscription which 
is written upon their foreheads, but by the functions 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE i6i 

which they serve. One penny is as good as another, 
because it serves the same function; but men differ 
in their functions, and if one man is to be regarded 
as being as good as another it must be for some other 
reason. Mr Chesterton leaves us in no doubt as to 
this other reason, but he does not help us to discover 
what we need to discover, namely, the relation of 
variety of function to unity or similarity in value. 
And he assures us that twelve pennies make a shilling : 
once again we are heartily with him. But how many 
men, or how many groups of men, make a society? 
Moreover, we recall the threepenny piece, and we still 
see the sixpenny bit ; are we to say that each of these 
is equal to the other and also to the penny, because 
all bear the same image of the King? In the sight 
of God all men may be equal ; but for the work of the 
world all men are not equal, and their inequality is 
measured by two tests: if several men are engaged 
in the same occupation, say, pianoforte playing, we 
shall not be convicted of stupidity or of inhumanity 
when we say that one is better than another, even if 
we are wrong in our opinion as to which is really the 
best: the best is he who does that thing, in the judg- 
ment either of ourselves or of a majority of listeners, 
or of some critic accredited with authority, better than 
the others: that is one test, applied to several com- 
petitors in a single field of activity. We use the other 
when we compare different fields of activity, thus we 
say that, while ^ is a first-rate cricketer, he is not so 
good as B at football; and the fact that A is good at 
cricket and B at football we refuse to take as evidence 



i62 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

that either of them is as good as C at the piano, or that 
either of them has any ability at all in playing on that 
instrument. We differentiate men according to the skill 
and the success with which they do their work, and 
also according to the nature of the work which they do. 
A more fertile analogy, fertile like all analogies both 
in crops of error and in harvests of truth, is that of 
a complicated machine. The machine as a whole is 
designed for some purpose and as a whole it works 
towards the fulfilment of that purpose. But the 
success of its total or general operation depends upon 
a fine adjustment of parts which serve several special 
ends, related to each other, but different from one 
another, and having as their one common attribute 
or quality the fact that they are all subordinate to 
an end which is other and greater than the per- 
formance of their several parts. Indeed, the difference 
between them is expressed by their relationship, and, 
even when we say that the perfect working of every 
part is necessary and essential to the working of the 
whole, we shall not be taken to mean that a small 
screw is as valuable or important as a boiler or a 
dynamo. The simplest household contains many in- 
struments and utensils of rare or frequent use ; some 
are for honour and some for dishonour. The simplest 
household involves a variety of labour; no part of it 
need be for dishonour, but no part of it is the same 
as another or intended to meet the same needs. A man 
does his work, his wife does hers, the servants, the 
children have their proper roles; and the most settled 
balance, the best ordered harmony is kept and pre- 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 163 

served when they find and remain in their proper 
places. 

Efficiency was not many years ago set up before 
us as an ideal. If the word means a condition of 
perfect fitness for the performance of a function 
specially suited to the gifts of any person, it needs 
little argument to show that with efficiency we must 
claim co-ordination. No one man can do the very 
thing for which he is supremely well adapted by 
nature and discipline if other people insist on doing 
the same thing at the same time in the same place ; 
but co-ordination is only another name for sub- 
ordination; the arrangement of persons and powers 
in an order designed for the achievement of a common 
end by many different agents. Justice, according to 
Plato, was simply that; the performance by each 
individual, and each group in a state or society, of 
the work appropriate to him or it. Justice is exhi- 
bited, it is indeed brought into being and preserved, 
by every man's minding his own business. Now here 
is the crux of the practical problem : how is the special 
business of each person to be discovered by himself 
or by others? If he discovers it himself, will he be 
permitted to do it ? If others discover it for him, how 
can they convince him that they have truly divined 
his gifts and so justly determined his function? They 
must convince him : merely to force him would be to 
defeat their own purpose. Plato, we remember, makes 
two assumptions, or rather lays down two premises. 
He makes no question that some services and the 
gifts which are necessary for their rendering are su- 



i64 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

perior to other services and gifts. He does not, of 
course, declare that these superior gifts and services 
are to be exercised or fulfilled without reference to 
other lower gifts and services : indeed, it is impossible 
to call anything or any person superior unless we 
compare him or it to an inferior; in its measure and in 
its place the inferior serves the superior as the superior 
serves it. And all the several elements of a state or 
society are bound together by the co-ordinated but 
differentiated services which each renders to the whole. 

That is the first premise ; his second is like it, but 
much harder of acceptance. He assumes, in the 
second place, that men will recognise these actual 
differences which separate only to associate them; 
that A will readily agree both that his gifts are other 
than those of B and that they are inferior to his, and 
that B will admit not unwillingly that he is the superior 
of A. Not unwillingly will he grant this, but not 
hastily; for to admit superior gifts is to accept graver 
responsibilities and to undergo an ascetic training. 

These gifts are natural, but they are to be dis- 
covered and proved by trial and perfected by a stern 
and lifelong discipline. The governors, the rulers, are 
nobly called "consummate artificers of liberty i," and 
it is clear that liberty is that exact co-ordination, 
that easy recognition of duty and of rank corre- 
sponding with duty which enables the members and 
classes of a composite society to cleave together. To 
keep these men from the danger of forgetting, for- 

1 Republic iii, 395 c. See Bosanquet, Education of the Young 
in the Republic of Plato. 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 165 

saking, and forswearing their supreme function they 
must be subjected to trials. From childhood tasks 
must be set them " in which a man might most readily 
forget or be deluded out of" the principle which is 
at the heart of liberty, the principle of order. Only 
those who can meet this test successfully are to be 
continued in training for the high profession of states- 
manship. And there is the further test of hard work 
and of pain ; they must learn to endure both. Lastly, 
there is the test of sudden encounter with terrors and 
pleasures, both of which may exercise a witchery over 
the mind, and soften it. They must be strong to resist 
these influences. All these proofs they must give in 
advance ; and in the end, when they have entered on 
their office, we must see, says Socrates, what manner 
of life we desire them to live, if they are to maintain 
their character and discharge their function. This is 
the manner of their life, 

first, none of them possessing any property of his own, 
except what is absolutely necessary; then, none to have 
any house or store-chamber into which all cannot enter 
when they please ; and their provisions, all that men need 
who are experts in warfare, temperate and brave, they 
are to receive on a settled estimate from the rest of the 
citizens as the wages of their guardianship, to such an 
amount that in every year there shall be neither surplus 
or deficit ; and to live in common like men in camp, having 
their meals together, and for gold and silver, we must 
tell them that they have these always in their souls, 
divine and god-given, and have no need of what men call 
such beside... for them alone of all that are in the city it 
is not allowable to handle gold and silver, nor to go under 
the same roof with it, nor to wear ornaments of it, nor 



i66 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

to drink out of silver and gold.... And so they would be 
safe, and save their city^. 

This is the training, this the manner of life of those 
who are fit to rule ; but those whom they rule, the 
military class and the productive or trading class, 
including every kind of artist and artificer, must be 
ready to perfect themselves for their several tasks by 
an exclusive and lifelong devotion to them. It is not 
necessary to do more than remind ourselves in passing 
that Plato makes provision by which a child, who 
by, nature belongs to one class but is by chance born 
in another, is put up or down into the class to which 
he can properly lay claim, his title being proved 
by his ability to render certain distinctive services. 
WTiat is to be remarked as the central doctrine is that 
services are rendered not so much by individuals to 
individuals or by this class to that, as by all indi- 
viduals and all classes to the total, to the society in 
which they live and move and have their being, and 
which in its turn springs into existence and continues 
to live in virtue of their co-ordinated activities. It 
is this which gives dignity, a sufficient but not the 
same dignity to all the active members of a society, 
and inactive members on this hypothesis cannot exist ; 
the description is indeed a contradiction in terms. 

We spoke earlier of an enlightened self-interest 
which would teach men to seek in one quarter for 
certain benefits and in another for others, and to pay 
back in mere and mercenary requital such balancing 
services as might be required. But self-interest cuts 

^ Republic iii, 416 d, e; 417 a (see Bosanquet, op cit.). 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 167 

the ground from under the feet of those who profess 
it and attempt to follow its guidance. There can be 
no life in a dismembered body; and a body articu- 
lated, compact of muscles and limbs, veins and 
arteries and organs of whatever kind is a total, the 
whole of which is affected by every operation of its 
constituent parts, while its constituent parts render 
service each to the rest through the total in relation to 
which alone they are parts and have significance. Thus 
it comes about that for any part to realise itself and 
indeed to be at all, it must needs lose itself in the other 
parts and in the whole, just as the whole only exists 
in the fulfilment and perfection of its constituents. 

These words have now come to be so easy on 
our lips that the theory indicated by them is not 
examined with the care which it deserves and which 
it would receive if it could come fresh and sudden 
and shocking to the world. At least we should ques- 
tion it, and ask whether indeed self-sacrifice is self- 
realisation, or a condition and the only condition upon 
which it can be won. We should refuse the facile 
assent which means that with the feigned form of 
politeness we quite resolutely decline to entertain the 
question, much less to adopt the theory. And to look 
steadily at this question is to see that it cannot be 
answered with a plain acquiescence or a blunt denial. 
Truth is a blade of two edges; it cuts both ways; 
and we have to make the best of a difficult position 
in which language cannot give us the precise ex- 
pression for what we come to believe. Self-sacrifice 
is not self-realisation ; because in fact there is no self- 



i68 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

sacrifice in the service of society. Self-realisation is 
not a goal at which we can properly aim; for, as has 
been shown, to realise ourselves is to realise our 
failures and our disabilities. Within the body of the 
state or of society a process goes on exactly com- 
parable with that which goes on within the body and 
in the spiritual or mental experience of the individual. 
The growth of a child from birth to maturity is a 
process in which it discovers one after another its 
own limbs and powers; while the discovery is new, 
the child has incomplete but conscious use of these 
limbs and exercise of these powers; while he has to 
think in order to walk, and thinks that he is walking, 
he walks stumblingly and uncertainly; it is only when 
he can think (about something else) while he is walking 
that he has fully learnt to walk. In other words, he 
has then and only then learnt to do this very necessary 
thing, when he has so perfectly co-ordinated the 
operations of walking with those other operations, 
with which they are associated or for the sake of 
which they are undertaken, that he walks uncon- 
sciously. The actions which we perform in writing 
illustrate the same fact. While we have to control 
and direct the movement of our fingers with conscious 
effort, we have not learnt to write; we have only 
learnt to write when we write without knowing it, 
intent on the purpose for the sake of which we under- 
take that laborious process. The perfect service of 
the hand guiding the pen is a service in which the 
hand moves unconsciously and is forgotten. Now, 
though it may be said truly that the hand is sub- 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 169 

ordinate to the mind the thoughts of which it traces 
on paper; yet, when the subordination is complete, 
when rivalry and opposition are impossible, when even 
polite and intentional co-operation is out of the ques- 
tion, then at last the hand and the mind are at one. 
All this has been discerned and illuminated with 
his accustomed and steady brilliance by Samuel 
Butler in his Life and Habit. The paradox and the 
truism to which he leads us can best be put in his 
own words. 

" It would appear," he writes, "as though perfect know- 
ledge and perfect ignorance were extremes which meet 
and become indistinguishable from one another; so also 
perfect volition and perfect absence of volition, perfect 
memory and utter f orgetf ulness ; for we are unconscious 
of knowing, willing, or remembering, either from not yet 
having known or willed, or from knowing and willing so 
well and so intensely as to be no longer conscious of either. 
Conscious knowledge and volition are of attention ; atten- 
tion is of suspense ; suspense is of doubt ; doubt is of un- 
certainty; uncertainty is of ignorance; so that the mere 
fact of conscious knowing or willing implies the presence 
of more or less novelty or doubt.... In either case — the 
repose of perfect ignorance or of perfect knowledge — dis- 
turbance is troublesome.... A uniform impression is prac- 
tically no impression. One cannot either learn or unlearn 
without pains or pain^." 

When we think about the nature of society it is 
very hard for us to figure to ourselves the repose either 
of perfect ignorance or of perfect knowledge; yet it 
is probably by a figure or a simile that we can come 
nearest to the meaning of these words and indeed 

1 op. cit. Fifield, 191 6, p. 1 8. 



170 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

discover whether they convey a meaning or not. The 
simplest society is clearly one made up of several 
members, distinct from each other, though united by 
some invisible bonds or some unanalysed alchemy 
which makes them one. A basket full of young puppies 
might represent for us such a group or society. They 
come of the same stock, they are related one to 
another, but they are not conscious yet of relation- 
ship. A family of young children may be related in 
the same way, and yet unaware of their relationship; 
and both puppies and children may be completely 
comfortable and at rest in that condition of blissful 
ignorance. But the condition does not last long. The 
young creatures grow, and to grow is to learn and 
unlearn; it is to unlearn the habit of a primitive 
harmony; it is to learn the steps which must be taken in 
the direction of a new and hitherto unreached concord. 

They suffer growing pains, and learn that here in 
them, of them, discernible but not separable, is a leg 
to be stretched, a tail to be wagged, an eye to turn 
beyond the edge of the basket and the limits of the 
home, upon a strange and untra veiled world. Each 
one of those movements causes a double awareness, 
awareness of self and awareness of the world, of that 
little world to which at the moment it extends. And 
awareness brings a twofold discomfort; the growing 
creature becomes too large for the place in which he 
discovers himself; feeling the distressing pressure of 
his neighbours, he distresses them by his own presence, 
trespassing upon them. 

This same family feeling already brings for puppies 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 171 

and for children a sense of the difference between the 
group of which they are members and the rest of the 
world. The puppies know themselves to be alien from 
the kittens of the household; the children know them- 
selves as a group to be different from and, they 
suspect, superior to the neighbour's children. But 
these increases of knowledge are all accompanied by 
a loss of stability of equilibrium: we are balancing 
and tottering and put out our hands upon our neigh- 
bours' shoulders, and they do as much for us. We 
learn to walk on our own legs, when we have broken 
up the happy rotundity of babyhood into those and 
other limbs and parts of the body; but at once we 
find that it is not on our own legs that we walk, or 
in our own strength; we quickly see that we are 
ourselves parts of a larger body, limbs in it, organs 
of it ; and the fact that we are, as we say, aware of 
ourselves, is only a part of that larger fact that it, 
that total, has become aware of us, and is in the same 
action casting us forth and leaning upon us, using us. 
It is very natural that we should think in terms of 
the individual, as we are wont to call him. Not to 
press further the argument that an individual does 
not deserve that singularly infelicitous name until he 
has in some measure at least divided himself into 
parts of which he is conscious and aware, let us rather 
note that what was said earlier about birth, must now 
be either recalled or corrected. We speak of birth as 
if it were the beginning of a new form of life, which 
detaches itself or is thrust forth from an older form. 
But we might equally well or better regard birth as 



172 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

the emergence of a new consciousness in the old form 
of life, which hitherto has not analysed itself into its 
real components. Some rapidly drawn illustrations 
may make this matter clear. When we speak of the 
Renaissance, we commonly suppose ourselves to mean 
the revival or the rebirth of classical studies in Europe, 
and we are quite right in assigning this meaning to 
the word; but we should be equally right if we de- 
clared that what we meant was a new life into which 
Europe entered when it disentangled from its pos- 
sessions a long disused treasure. Or, again, if we 
speak of the discovery of a force like electricity or of 
a star, we are prone to fix our notice on the thing 
discovered as if it were new indeed : newly discovered 
it certainly may be, but the discovery consisted in 
an analysis more shrewd and accurate than any con- 
ducted hitherto into the total of the world in which 
we already lived, and which contained the new thing 
before we were aware of its existence. 

It is the world which becomes new by a process 
of self-analysis. The process must be traced back to 
its origin, though for our purpose the origin must be 
arbitrarily marked. We can imagine for ourselves, 
or for a world or for any living whole, a condition of 
quiescent satiety; but this condition passes away; it 
is followed by hunger and the effort to appease hunger, 
and a further effort to amass a store against need. 
For nourishment to be absorbed reproduction is 
necessary, we throw into our activities something of 
ourselves; when we succeed in putting into our work 
or our play more than we ordinarily give of ourselves 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 173 

we caU that work or play, that achievement or per- 
formance our creation, our chUd. We can stand away 
from it, and criticise it ; it is itself a critic and a criterion 
of our vitality. The whole world is a great artificer, 
a general parent, thrusting out its own life in ever 
new manifestations or births of creative energy. The 
whole creation groans and travails in this constant 
task, self-imposed or natural, call it what we may, 
of re-making itself. And the process is one of pain. 
The offspring may or may not at first suffer agony, 
the parent always does. But pain awaits the new life 
too, and springs from the double effort of realising, 
that is analysing itself, and of realising, that is once 
more of analysing, its relation to the source from 
which it sprang. The new reconstructs the old world 
and becomes the parent of its progenitor. The child 
is father of the man, because it makes the man a 
father. It renders the like service to the mother. 

We must not then be too much disheartened by 
the troubles of the world. Certainly, we must admit 
that there are dislocations and damages, malforma- 
tions and other calamities; it is the office of govern- 
ment, that medical faculty in the state, to arrange, 
to adjust, to correct these; but the very meaning of 
healthy growth and development is the discovery 
and the fashioning of relationships: until these are 
fashioned there must ever be a want of harmony and 
co-ordination, and the method of fashioning them is 
nothing else than the discovery of them. To invent 
is to create, to discover is to make. Polytheism is a 
mode of apprehending the universe by which man, 



174 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

discovering deity everywhere, breaks the sUent and 
inarticulate unity of Godhead into a multitude of 
related persons who may speak one to another and, 
each in a special voice to match his special needs, to 
man. The divine solitude blossoms into a family. 
When the tedium of celestial domesticity wears the 
nerves of the gods in Olympus, Homer sends them 
upon a visit to the blameless Ethiopians, for the re- 
freshment which comes from conversation, from the 
discovery and enjoyment of new relationships. Else- 
where we have the same fact proclaimed, the same 
lesson taught in other and subtler language. The 
word which was God is the word which was from God ; 
the proof of his unity is the consciousness of himself 
made articulate in speech to the creatures with whom 
he is identified, and from whom to make that oneness 
real he must dissever himself. 

Speech, the instrument of alliance, is the engine of 
definition; a treaty is set out in terms, and a perfect 
boundary is the invisible line which marks and makes 
sacred the vivid and throbbing connections of a differ- 
entiated and therefore unified life. Until the boundary 
has been perfectly drawn we attempt with skilled or 
clumsy fingers to trace it. We quarrel with what are 
called class distinctions; we should rather lament 
their obliteration. A map strewn with the names of 
provinces the limits of which are not understood and 
observed is a symbol of war. Within any society, large 
or small, distinction of class should stand for a system 
of interrelated services. Granted the names survive 
when the distinctions have been blurred. It is an 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 175 

argument for renewing the vital distinctions, or re- 
cognising new distinctions which shall correspond 
with fresh and real relationships. It is an argument 
for restoring unity, which is threatened and almost 
destroyed by confusion. The power which can claim 
to be Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, 
is ever engaged in the work of creation, making all 
things new by ever freshly arranging and distributing 
its own powers. Creation begins at the end. Yet, 
since imagination boggles at a thought so simple, we 
make for ourselves, like writers of school histories, an 
arbitrary starting-point. 

Far back in unmeasured time, we say, in a solitary 
world was a thing, the germ of life, but counter- 
feiting death in its speechlessness and surpassing 
death in its deathless stillness. Yet life it is and a 
living thing, and it preys upon the world in which it 
miserably and hungrily exists. It finds its nourish- 
ment, or rather absorbs what is provided for it ; with 
food it grows ; it grows by gluttony and bursts with 
repletion. Behold the one is become two, the two a 
multitude. The patch of the universe which sustained 
one is too narrow for the multitude, the food supply 
is insufficient, and the innumerable offspring of that 
elemental one are engaged in war upon their kindred. 
Slaughter cannot keep the demand for food within 
the limits of the supply, and perforce migration begins, 
a search is made for new feeding-grounds. But these 
are already tenanted, for the world which we sup- 
posed solitary had other, also speechless, inhabitants. 
Accustomed to fratricidal contests, the invading forces 



176 UNITY AND DIFFERENCE [ch. 

combine to struggle with those whose territory they 
desire to plunder. Out of war springs alliance, the 
alliance of armed and opposing powers. Large alli- 
ances and wider conflicts are made and begun. Struggle 
develops special powers, which, continued and per- 
fected through generations, become inheritances. 

Man himself has such a history and such an origin. 
He hates the rival claimants for the food which he 
requires. He loathes his loneliness. He finds a mate 
in whose ear he can breathe his detestation of the 
horrible world, and breathe too his hope of ease after 
conflict. He for her, she for him, the partners labour 
for each other : a family, a group of families grow up, 
and become at once an organised selfishness and a 
society. Tribes, states, wide confederacies are estab- 
lished upon the same double foundation, of alliance 
between the members and hostility to all who are not 
members of the group. A silence falls, a stillness in 
the conflict, and in the faces of opponents men see 
a likeness to their own, in the faces of their kindred 
the evidence of difference and hostility — and the old 
barriers break, man sickens in loneliness again; but 
revives once more, and guesses at a larger unity: the 
world shall be his home, he declares, and all men his 
brothers. He guesses at a more sublime unity; he 
guesses at God, whose presence has always haunted 
him; the forebodings and alarms, the hopes and as- 
pirations of his earlier life, suggested by mere events, 
manifestations of this or that several force, combine 
in his memory, and now seem to be the varied opera- 
tions not of many separate powers, but of one. With 



XII] UNITY AND DIFFERENCE 177 

that one he claims alliance, against that one he 
measures his pitiful strength, into that one he is 
taken up. His world, which is himself, is become one 
with God, who, because self-love is intolerable, breaks 
himself into that manifold which we call the world 
once more, and proves divinity articulate by entering 
into the form of every hving thing. 



CHAPTER XIII 
ARTISTS AND MEN 

LET US imagine ourselves in any company of people 
^ at liberty to ask each one whether he is a plain 
man or an artist. What will be the answer? One will 
reply "An artist? indeed not ! " And there will be a 
note of indignation in his voice. Another will laugh 
Q-^d proclaim himself a plain man, showing how odd 
be thought the inquiry. Others will say that the 
question is not necessary: "Surely you can see for 
yourself" — and so indeed we can. They are plain 
men. Not artists, but plain men — that will be the 
reply we shall get from almost all — from ninety-nine 
out of a hundred. But when we agree with them 
quickly, heartily, and with an air of unhesitating 
acceptance, and look once more into their faces we 
shall surprise a sharp but courageously veiled dis- 
appointment. Let us look once more into those faces 
and we shall learn that something more is to be said, 
and perhaps wUl be said — "Plain, yes; but — but, I 
beg you believe, not so plain as I appear" — -"plain 
no doubt, but not so plain as the next man or the 
last." "Plain, but mark you, with a distinction." 
"I am exactly like my neighbour, or the people of 
my class; only I have managed to come nearer than 
they to our common ideal," 

The word is out — ^let us forget it for a moment. 
A gentleman must drawl and drop his g's and some 



CH.xiii] ARTISTS AND MEN 179 

of his h's, precisely as another gentleman affects these 
habits; but each is aware of a certain special pro- 
priety in his own use of a custom. A lady must be 
in the fashion, and may even employ the same dress- 
maker as some other (to be sure, the best) ladies, and 
that devoted and skilful woman will do her utmost 
for all her clients. Since each one of them would 
blush to wear the wrong thing, we may take it that 
each is wearing the right thing; why then is each 
conscious of superiority? It is because she knows how 
to put on and carry the uniform, the livery of the 
fashion. For a fashion is like a faith, a thing delivered 
to us by authority, to be accepted and yet to be inter- 
preted; and orthodoxy is driven to criticism for fear 
of being overtaken by dulness. 

Yet a fashion is not Fashion, a faith is not Faith : 
there are fashions and fashions, faiths and faiths; a 
man who is an adherent, perhaps even an exemplary 
adherent of this mode or that creed may reasonably 
declare that he cannot at the same time adopt a mode 
or a creed which is different from his own; but he 
cannot reasonably deny that his neighbour who is an 
adherent, perhaps also an exemplary adherent of that 
other mode, that rival creed, is a man of Fashion, a 
man of Faith. Men express their loyalty to Faith 
and Fashion as best they may in the varying and 
temporary forms of this mode and this creed, or of 
that other mode and that other creed. Expression 
they need, for without it they cannot be understood 
by themselves or by their fellows ; but in every utter- 
ance they define not only themselves but also Faith 



i8o ARTISTS AND MEN [ch. 

and Fashion, those majestic and infinite powers. 
Pearl buttons mark correctness upon the trouser leg 
of a coster-monger, but a solicitor eschews them. 
A silk hat was and, so it is rumoured, is again to be 
worn by persons who shall do the right thing — but 
what is right depends on time and place. The strictest 
of men will refuse — ^justly refuse — to wear it on the 
river, though they will chng to it at a wedding or at 
a funeral or in the hunting-field. Yet there are trust- 
worthy pictures of bearded youths wearing this head- 
dress in racing boats on the Thames. Strange fellows 
we think they look in those faded prints; stranger 
stiU should we think them if they came to life, and 
struck the familiar waters with their oars. But in 
their own day, they were just plain men. Or we may 
well believe, if there was anything to remark about 
them, it was that they were plainer than the plain. 
They lifted plainness to a certain elevation. There 
is a distinction for a man in being more orthodox than 
other members of his party or persuasion. This is not 
vulgarity, but it is near it ; it is almost heroic. 

And yet we must remark that these instances are 
of things common to a class, a section; not common 
to humanity. For after all, a man may be a man 
without being a costermonger; and if a costermonger, 
richly dight with pearl buttons, he may fall short of 
the most rigorous and the widest demands of hu- 
manity. Indeed we all fall short of those demands, 
and the best that we can hope for in ourselves is a 
devoted service of the fashion which governs our 
region, our quarter or our class. To that we must 



XIII] ARTISTS AND MEN i8i 

truly belong, and anything that shall signalise us 
must be a special completeness and perfection of our 
fitness to our station. To adapt ourselves to our en- 
vironment without losing our individuality is the 
problem in which we are all engaged. How much 
store we set on solving it ! and how many and how 
costly are our mistakes ! We hate to be singular, but 
we should hate not less to be passed by ! A respect- 
able person, if we may take the word at its face value, 
is a person at whom people turn back to look once 
again : his ordinariness simply glistens. And it glistens 
because it is diligently polished. 

Polishing, as we know, wears down some substances 
and makes them very thin. Life wears away our 
roughnesses, our angles, our excrescences and oddities, 
and we are delighted to have grown like our neigh- 
bours ; but we may presently be worn to shadows and 
at last to mere nothingness, invisible before we are 
quite dead — yet loyal throughout to our hope and 
faithful to our pattern. How lucky if the pattern was 
a decent thing indeed, and really fit for us. But to 
be pressed into a form for which we were wholly im- 
fitted, or into a form unworthy even of us, and to 
rejoice in our sufferings — to try to identify our faith 
with Faith, our fashion with Fashion — that were 
a parody of heroism meet for the tears of angels. 
Addison gives an account of a "young man of very 
lively parts, and of a sprightly turn in conversation, 
who had only one fault, which was an inordinate 
desire of appearing fashionable." Of the desire to be 
like the members of his class no complaint is made ; 



i82 ARTISTS AND MEN [ch. 

it is the urgency, the extravagance, the inordinacy of 
his desire that is noted: 

This ran him into many amours, and consequently into 
many distempers. He never went to bed until two o'clock 
in the morning, because he would not be a queer fellow; 
and was every now and then knocked down by a constable 
to signalise his vivacity. He was initiated into half a 
dozen clubs before he was one and twenty; and so im- 
proved in them his natural gaiety of temper, that you 
might frequently trace him to his lodgings by a range of 
broken windows, and other the like monuments of wit 
and gallantry. To be short, after having fully established 
his reputation of being a very agreeable rake, he died of 
old age at five and twenty^. 

He was a martyr to plainness; his world was that 
of a certain fashion and he desired to play a full part 
in it ; to do less than that, he felt, would be to make 
himself singular and exceptional. Yet one cannot but 
feel that the very success of his efforts to avoid pecu- 
liarity marked him out from his crowd. He became 
plainer than the plain, he was more thorough-going 
than the rest in very mediocrity. The mean which he 
hit was indeed an extreme. He was drawn to the 
centre of his special world as to the vortex of a whirl- 
pool and untimely drowned in it, and making himself 
pitiable made his little universe ridiculous. 

Most men desiring to achieve a round measure of 
plainness explore the boundaries of their world: they 
are cast up by a tumultuous wave, or by a temerarious 
stroke lift themselves to the edge of a new country. 
To be sure they do not describe their own fortunes 

1 spectator, No, 576. 



XIII] ARTISTS AND MEN 183 

in this language; they do not think about them in 
this way. They would rather tell us if they were able 
to tell us the truth, that they were at once devotees 
and critics of the conventions which they admired; 
that they sought and found a point of vantage from 
which they could survey them. But what risks they 
run! The detachment which they enjoy as critics 
they may be condemned to endure as exiles; they 
may not be able to get back to their native element. 
The temper of devotion to their antique custom may 
unfit them to appreciate a new mode of life. If the 
specialist is a suicide the man of the world may pay 
for his wide travels the price of homelessness. 

We cherish peculiarity but hate to be considered 
eccentric. Let us imagine ourselves introduced to a 
stranger but provided only with the information that 
he is an artist. Let us presume for the convenience 
of our argument that he is as yet not widely known 
to fame; or, if that is unfair, and if all artists are 
famous, let us suppose that we have missed most un- 
luckily the reverberating echoes of his renown. " You 
are an artist. Sir? " we enquire, distrusting ourselves, 
and hoping that he will give us the help we need for 
drawing our conversation to a decent length; and 
what is his reply? "I paint" or "I play the violin," 
and his statement is as short and sharp as if he had 
said "an artist, yes I make chimney-pots" or "I sell 
cheese." If we take him at his word, he will show at 
once that he is affronted ; he lets us see that we have 
done him an injury. He claims to be a man among 
men, a citizen of the same world as the rest of us, but 



i84 ARTISTS AND MEN [ch. 

dealing with that world, interpreting it to himself and 
himself to it through the medium of his special busi- 
ness or art; he will have us accept him as for most 
purposes a plain man, and the truth may very well 
be that he is as plain as he professes himself. An 
artist must pay his rent and may even pay his tailor. 
An artist, though perhaps not every artist, has been 
known to drive a hard bargain, to make a good in- 
vestment and build up a solid balance with his 
bankers; and a man who is known or desires to be 
known to the world as a painter or as a musician 
cannot but be known to his own family and to his 
own servants as one who plays other than his pro- 
fessional parts. 

The artist is tempted to make two mistakes : first, 
to persuade himself that the point of view which he 
has adopted is the only point of view, and second, to 
believe that his rendering of the world as he appre- 
hends it from his position is the world itself. When 
he makes the first mistake, he becomes an egotist and 
a propagandist; when he makes the second he too 
falls into a sorry materialism. The egotist is a man 
so much delighted with himself that he stereot57pes 
himself, and, as it were, prints off as many copies as 
he can to be distributed like tracts in an ungrateful 
though perhaps a patient world. 

Art is a way of doing things; the art of painting 
is the way, a way, this man's, that man's way of 
painting; the art of screw-making is the way, a way 
of making screws; there is also an art of getting on. 
Now by the time a man has found out a way of doing 



XIII] ARTISTS AND MEN 185 

axiythmg, and brought it to near perfection, he has 
got a certain facihty in doing that thing; he goes on 
doing it, and prides himself on his dexterity. It is 
easier for him to do that than to do other things, it 
is almost easier for him to do that than to do nothing. 
He does at length by a mental machinery what at 
first cost him the pain of thought and tired hands. 
He becomes a factory; perhaps he builds a factory. 
It is all one. He has a recognised style ; his pictures 
are known, they can be recognised; his screws com- 
mand the market; his poems are the rage; his pills 
are a household word and perhaps a people's medicine, 
good for all ailments, to be taken on land and sea; 
or he is a wit, a licensed wit, and repeats himself and 
is repeated. It is his way of doing what he has learnt 
to do and his facility has become a formula. 

Whatever we do we are dealing with the world, 
focussing it for ourselves, ferreting our way into it, 
boring it with our painters' eyes or our screws, burying 
ourselves in the rut which we have made. We see as 
much as we give ourselves the chance of seeing; and 
the danger of success is that we strive to maintain 
for ever a pose which we have once taken and found 
pleasing or useful. Was there ever a girl who caught 
herself at a glass or mirrored in an affectionate eye, 
who was loath to repeat the gesture, to renew the 
winning attitude? Was there ever a man who, having 
said a good thing, sternly denied himself the joy of 
saying it again? But the repetition may be made too 
often; and the art, the pretty way of doing the thing, 
the happy mot, may become a trick. A trick is art 



i86 ARTISTS AND MEN [ch. 

debased; a trick is art looking at itself, and courting 
by deliberate coyness or meretricious cleverness, the 
plaudits of a world which has learned to clap its hands 
and forgotten how to smile. 

Yet we need not banish the familiar; we may allow 
a conservatism, an economy in jests; we may confess 
our love of hearing the old stories of our friends, and 
of telling again and again our own. Such sentiments 
are common and right. Familiarity itself may give 
a new wealth, may bestow a fresh charm upon a 
thing prized, and drawn from the treasure of memory 
to grace a recurrent festival. 

We are all artists at heart ; or are we pla5dng tricks? 
A mite may be convinced that all the world is a 
cheese ; but if it attacks the cheese which is its world 
with vigour, driving ever new avenues through it, 
riddling it, consuming it, and perishing at last tired 
out with its own versatility, it would be a broad- 
minded mite. Or a man who has failed in a hundred 
attempts to write or paint or dance or make money, 
may essay one more adventure and still one more, 
baffled but not daunted, and drawing from the variety 
of his defeated but ever renewed efforts an unfailing 
interest in the world which mocks and provokes him. 
It concerns him, that world ; he cannot let it be ; and 
it will not let him be, though it may almost starve 
him. Such a man is more conversant with the world 
than another who has hit home, thrust in, and made 
his way straight to success. The one is alive; the 
other dead. 

The artist may make the mistake of supposing that 



XIII] ARTISTS AND MEN 187 

what he sees is the whole world — but he pays the 
penalty; he ceases to be an artist. It is his prero- 
gative, since he is human, to take a point of view; 
if he is absorbed in himself, if he identifies what he 
sees with all that might be seen, he perishes. He 
becomes a monument of mere achievement. To live 
he must move; and to move is to see new and 
different worlds. 

The plain man often has a wider range than the 
professed artist. Not enamoured by his own phrases, 
not enchanted by the view afforded him by the windows 
of his office, he may take a rare holiday and see the big 
world at work or at play, and return to his desk with 
eyes enriched and illumined, more broadly and pro- 
foundly educated than that other who spends his life 
seizing one landscape or one face or one type of 
landscape and face, and imprisoning it and his own 
soul on a saleable or even an unsaleable canvas. 

The plain man often has a much wider, a more 
liberal training than the scholar: the world is his 
University; even if he makes cheeses he studies the 
palates and the purses of those who are to buy and 
eat them. It is good for an artist to have his price ; 
but not good for him to be precious. He must learn 
to seU his works, and keep himself inviolate. He 
should take a lesson from the market-place. Even 
the advertisements of trade have a large imperson- 
ality. Mr Rowland was no doubt a man; but we 
think of him as a hair-restorer. Mr Pears gives or 
gave us soap and withheld himself, and asked us for 
nothing but our shillings, knowing that we would give 



i88 ARTISTS AND MEN [ch.xiii 

them if we could give our approval with them. The 
artist claims and begs for our allegiance; but should 
accept it only if we keep for ourselves a proud inde- 
pendence. His work he puts on the market ; himself 
he offers us as a gift ; and we cannot possess the work, 
however much we may have paid for it, unless we 
take the gift, freely indeed, yet at the high cost of 
understanding him. He has the self-abandonment of 
true pride, and wrapt in a splendid nakedness defies 
our curiosity and disregards our stare. He throws the 
passion of a life into the ecstasy of a moment; he 
gives the toilsome practice of years to a work on 
which we may bestow a hurried glance — it is enough 
that he has done what he could for that, and he goes 
on to do what next awaits him. Is immortality his 
reward? Yes; but at the price of death renewed; for 
every reader or spectator he is born afresh ; and with 
each he dies. He transcends himself; and escapes 
through the asceticism of love to the fulfilment of 
desire; he is forgotten but lives. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE TEACHER'S ART 

" A rt" and "artist" are words which we are apt 
X\. to confine within hmits too narrow. Art is, we 
have maintained, a way of doing a thing, but it is 
more than that: it is an excellent way of doing a 
thing, and excellence is not achieved without devo- 
tion and practice. The artist is a man who has 
won or is diligently pursuing excellence. But he 
must be content to forsake much that seems good 
to himself and to other men, if he is to reach this 



The world is spread before the artist as it is spread 
before any other man ; he cannot but see it ; he hears 
the voices with which it speaks to him and to other 
men; it reaches out to him and touches him. With 
it he must have dealings, with it he must maintain 
a conversation ; he must eat and drink, and sleep and 
wake; he must have clothes and a house ; but he tries 
either to hasten through his other business with the 
world as quickly as he can in order to have leisure 
for what he calls his work, or else he tries to make all 
his other business contribute to his main interest and 
serve his dominant ambition. The world has seldom 
applauded his judgment ; it has found fault with him 
either for giving scanty attention to matters which 
in dignity and in importance, in usefulness and in 
consideration seemed to it to outweigh the one thing 



190 THE TEACHER'S ART [ch. 

to which the artist hastened to betake himself, or for 
striving to subordinate serious concerns to play. 

We may grant that, if the artist's play is of a kind 
that can afford amusement to the onlooker, the world 
has been ready to look on; if in his play he showed an 
agility, a skill marvellous to the beholder, it rewarded 
him with the gaze of wondering eyes, and regarded 
him as a spectacle ; but the artist remained a " player," 
and the exhibition which he provided was a "show." 
These names for himself and for his performance the 
artist has not been unwilling to adopt, and has con- 
firmed the world in its opinion that the man and what 
he does are not serious, and scarcely real. And then, 
he is making an exhibition of himself, and this the 
world of plain men believes itself very loath to do. 
There may indeed be an artist, here and there, one 
out of many, a rare creature who can sell his wares 
at a figure which catches the eye of the plain man> 
and makes him wonder whether after all the artist is 
the fool he once seemed to be ; but quickly he corrects 
himself for the trouble of having had to think twice 
by declaring that not at any price would he make an 
exhibition of himself or do in public what the artist 
does. 

No, the plain man will not make an exhibition of 
himself, though his name stands in large letters of 
advertisement set thickly in every town and strewn 
freely in country villages and beside the railroads. 
He is not disposed to regard himself as a candidate 
for notoriety — at any rate, not for notoriety of that 
sort. The artist is, in his language, an entertainer. 



XIV] THE TEACHER'S ART 191 

and though he may flatter himself that he is indeed 
entertaining, he would shrink with horror from the 
suggestion of becoming a public entertainer. Great 
names he might use in support of this sentiment. 
Aristotle, here at one with Plato, expressed it for the 
Greeks. A citizen, a ruler, might permit himself to 
enjoy the performances of a professional entertainer, 
a musician or a dancer, but himself would not desire 
to rival them. There are some arts which a man may 
practise in moderation and as an amateur; but he 
should blush to have more than an amateur's skill in 
them, or to go beyond the reputable bounds of 
moderation. Latin literature, and not only with the 
pens of Satirists, bears witness to the recognition of 
this convention in Rome and the Roman world. In 
England we know that it is or has been held unseemly 
to have more than a gentleman's or a lady's pro- 
ficiency in arts which are and always were held in 
honour. Even in our games we distinguish between 
"gentlemen" and "players," and here we find once 
more the notion of play identified with the notion of 
professionalism. The profession of the arts, especially 
perhaps of the arts of painting and of music, has been 
characteristic of "Bohemia," and though visits to 
that vaguely defined territory may be a permissible 
and pardonable diversion for persons who could not 
by any mistake be conceived to be natives or even 
naturalised dwellers in it, the visits, it is generally 
agreed, must not be too frequent or too long. The 
emphasis, the value which Bohemians set upon things 
may provoke a tolerant smile or even a generous laugh, 



192 THE TEACHER'S ART [ch. 

but it is the impropriety of the emphasis, the dispro- 
portion of the value which afford us, who are not 
Bohemians, our merriment. And nothing probably 
marks the difference between Bohemians and the 
polite world more decisively than the affectation of 
Bohemianism by persons who have as little claim to 
be artists as they have to be staunch defenders of the 
established, though sometimes endangered, conven- 
tions upheld by correct and unintelligent patrons of 
the arts. 

The artist, for good or for ill, with well directed 
choice or with lamentable error, has said for himself 
"This one thing I do." And the ultimate question 
to be asked about him is whether his declaration is 
to be accepted literally or not. If the answer is that 
he is engaged literally in one thing, then in seeking 
to save his soul he has lost it. But if the one thing 
which he does is the medium, the language, in which 
he speaks to the large and general world, if it is the 
language through which he interprets whatever the 
world has to say to him, then in losing his life he has 
gained it. Abandoning himself in his work, he has 
acquired the supreme art of conversation with the 
world, he has a passport into it because he can con- 
tribute to its welfare and make it contribute to his own. 

A sensible man will not refuse to listen to what 
other men say upon themes in regard to which he can 
only be a listener, but he will listen in the hope of 
presently seizing a meaning which now escapes him, 
and, by translating it, of widening the range at once 
of his language and of his experience. He wiU not 



XIV] THE TEACHER'S ART 193 

deign to speak of the whole of his experience, for he 
knows the difference between discourse and unhcensed 
and unregulated chatter. He selects from his ex- 
perience those parts which are especially significant, 
the parts namely in which he has made some sharp 
and memorable discovery of himself, or in which he 
believes that he has surprised in sudden revela- 
tion or after patient search found the meaning 
of his own heart, and made his own experience in- 
telligible to himself. These elements selected, he 
orders and arranges with a double purpose : he wishes 
to get them quite clear and distinct; he wishes also 
to bring them into the coherence of a living system, 
to articulate them, to give them free and concerted 
movement. But he does not forget that a living 
system maintains itself not only by the fine poise of 
its parts, but by the relationship which it also estab- 
lishes and enlarges with other systems and with the 
general world. The result is that for him self-realisa- 
tion brings a keen and sensitive consciousness of the 
reality of other people. 

The artist is notorious for his self-consciousness; it 
may become morbid; it cannot indeed become too 
delicate, for the finest delicacy goes with health and 
strengtli : but it will save him from shouldering a 
clumsy way through the world, and if it renders him 
quick to receive and to enjoy kindness, the delightful 
recognition of kinship, where kinship exists and kind- 
ness is its natural expression, it may arm him against 
unkindness by teaching him, after many sorrows en- 
dured, that where no kinship is there is in fact no. 



194 THE TEACHER'S ART [ch. 

relationship; and without relationship there is no 
reality. If it is true that till he has learnt this lesson 
he will pay for his sensibility with pain, it is not less 
true that till he has learnt it his sensibility falls some- 
thing short of perfection. "This one thing I do" is a 
claim which we expect from the religious man; but 
it is now clear that this is because the religious man 
is an artist. His art is life; he has his way; his life 
and his way are also truth. There is no greater claim 
that a man can make; there is none smaller that is 
worth a man. For this claim reconciles the personal 
with the universal, emotion with reason; it is the 
claim of a man who being able to discourse with 
himself offers his heart with a bold reserve to the 
world and wrests its heart in requital for his own. 

The teacher being human can make no other claim 
than this. Yet he may run a special risk of being 
misunderstood. We must assume that the teacher 
has the rigour of conscience and the eagerness of 
inquiry, which mark the scholarly temper. He may 
have and cultivate this temper even if he has no great 
wealth of learning, and without this temper learning 
is mere baggage carried by a beast of burden walking 
with uncertain steps upon two legs, a sorry substitute 
for the sure-footed ass. Learned or not, the teacher- 
scholar is a man who is bent upon doing one thing. 
The one thing which he has to do is to quicken for 
himself the reality of his subject, and to persuade the 
world of its reality. He exposes himself to attack from 
two quarters at once; we arraign him as a fanatic 
and as a tyrant. Fanatic we call him because he must 



XIV] THE TEACHER'S ART 195 

look at the world from his own standpoint, and tyrant 
because he is fain to compel us others to look at it 
from the same position. How many angels may set 
their celestial feet upon a needle's point is a fertile 
if an unanswerable question; how many men can 
share with another his standpoint is a question to 
which the summary answer is " None." A greengrocer 
driving his wholesome trade may supply his cus- 
tomers with greens, but he may not force them to 
buy: and if long and affectionate contemplation of 
the produce of the vegetable garden has screened his 
very mind with a cabbage-coloured veil he has no 
right to fasten however thin a gauze of green upon 
our eyes. Yet if he speaks to us and tries for our 
understanding to paint what he sees he cannot be 
honest if he stubbornly refuses to employ that very 
pigment which renders the dominant hue of his world. 
If he attempted honesty at this price he could achieve 
only colourlessness, and that would be meaningless- 
ness. 

The teacher is more subtly tempted than the green- 
grocer to become a tyrant. Those of us, indeed, who 
pay his bill, and in that sense are his customers, are his 
contemporaries and maybe strong to withstand him: 
but those who receive what he has to give are younger 
and less well practised in self-defence: for them, soft 
and untried, his persuasion has the force of authority, 
and when they do not know what he means they may 
deceive him and themselves by repeating what he 
has said as if they meant it. And if he is satisfied that 
what he says is the truth, if he is assured even that 



196 THE TEACHER'S ART [ch. 

he provides not indeed all that his pupils need but 
a part of what they need for the fulfilment of their 
own lives and the discharge of their duties in the 
world, for carrying on their conversation with it, 
then it is easy for him to mistake the facile repetition 
of his doctrine for its interpretation. 

Yet now, when he stands on the edge of sheer dis- 
aster, his fanaticism may save him, for the fanatic 
has quick ears for heresy, and catching the note of 
mimicry or missing the accent of conviction quickly 
determines that to be a tyrant is to be both an im- 
postor and a dupe. He wUl not suffer the object of 
his devotion to be profaned. He may find delight in 
mathematics or in classics or in whatever subject; he 
may work hard to convey some knowledge to his 
pupils; he may try to quicken and foster in them 
some genuine appreciation of it; he may hope that 
they too will find delight in it ; but he will not expect 
that their appreciation or their delight will be his own ; 
for he knows that they are and will always be them- 
selves and is resolved to remain himself. His stand- 
point they cannot take, and he would not have them 
take it. Being an artist he is condemned to a divine 
loneliness; their ways are not his ways, nor their 
thoughts his thoughts. 

But his loneliness wakes in him, as in a god, the 
energy of creation, and he makes as best he can 
a world with which he speaks; to a void he brings 
substance, to chaos order, he arranges and disposes, 
and bestows the gift of speech; conversation he must 
have with his pupils; and they must become articu- 



XIV] THE TEACHER'S ART 197 

late, and then the language which he and they hold 
together is the language of partial understanding 
clouded by apprehension, cleared by reconciliation, 
silenced by estrangement, and renewed by atonement 
ever to be renewed, a sacrifice in which his life is 
spent. At the end he is solitary still, but he has dis- 
covered himself; he may have helped his pupils to 
discover themselves; they may, pupils and teacher, 
find and behold the " subject " with which so long they 
had been wrestling, they in the dark and he in some- 
thing less than daylight, illumined as by a shaft from 
a heavenly dawn. 

This is the best recompense that a teacher may 
aspire to get, this brightening of his own vision, this 
assurance that his pupils have seen, not what he sees, 
but something which has kindled in their eyes the 
gleam of recognition. Yet the teacher is a plain man 
too; he remembers that the little world of his own 
creation is set in another, larger world; in it his pupils 
and he move, and soon they move apart. He indeed 
cannot travel far from his base, his centre, his class- 
room, his shop, and when he travels it is a long path 
which his own going and coming have beaten hard ; 
they will range more widely. Only for a short time 
he has their society. Like as the leaves, so are the 
generations of men. Faster than the generations of 
men, pupils come alid go. It is not with them only 
that he has to deal. It is also with that larger 
world, that void, that chaos from which he seemed 
to call them, that strange and alien society into 
which they depart — it is with that world that he must 



198 THE TEACHER'S ART [ch. xiv 

converse and do his business. He sells his goods, such 
as may be bought; he commands his price, the best 
he can afford time and trouble to bargain for; and 
some time and some trouble he must devote to bar- 
gaining; but himself he gives without price to those 
who can take him; yet always upon the condition, 
which not all the world can understand, that he never 
gives himself away. 



CHAPTER XV 
IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 

WE have called Education the process by which 
men acquire the art of conversation, the prac- 
tice of pleasant and useful intercourse with their 
fellows. It is clear that men can never have wholly 
lacked this art, never been wholly unversed in this 
practice. For convenience, and in order to support 
theories to which they were for good or bad reasons 
pledged, certain great writers have indeed drawn 
imaginary pictures of human life as they have feigned 
that it was conducted before society was formed; but, 
though these pictures have had and still retain a 
value, it is agreed that they are imaginary, and that 
well or ill their authors have been feigning. History 
can tell us nothing of men apart from society. At the 
very dawn of the world men found themselves in a 
society, the reality of which they wished at once to 
prove and to strengthen ; they discovered themselves 
engaged in commerce with this society, and since they 
longed to quicken and multiply their relationships 
with it, they determined that they must first under- 
stand its nature. 

In the demand insistently made at the present day 
for education, for more education, and for education 
of an increasing number of persons, we have an en- 
dorsement, a confirmation of the account which we 
have given of Education. For the plain and potent 



200 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [ch. 

reason which has made people ask for education is 
that they have felt with distress that they had not 
fully acquired or perfectly mastered the art of con- 
versation, the practice of pleasant and useful inter- 
course with their fellows. On some matters they have, 
it is true, learned to converse, on some they are able 
to maintain intercourse with their fellows; but even 
upon these they have been conscious that by a clumsi- 
ness in their use of speech, by a bluntness in their 
modes of thought they have been kept from a full 
understanding even of those persons with whom they 
have held a halting conversation and from drawing 
the full benefit which the matters which they have 
handled would havejdelded to a finer touch. And they 
have been conscious, moreover, that they have been 
debarred from approach to other matters, the objects 
of their longing, of their jealous, if unintelligent re- 
gard. Some persons, they have been aware, can deal 
deftly with the matters with which they themselves 
are roughly familiar, and have easy access to and 
Command of other matters which they themselves 
cannot reach. They are disposed to envy these more 
fortunate or better equipped persons both for having 
a special mastery of the world which they themselves 
know with that rough familiarity, and for holding the 
secret of another world which they do not know. Into 
that other world they desire to enter. 
' Here they make a distinction between society and 
the best society. The charge of snobbery is easily 
tnade and may be lightly repelled. The truth is that 
every man makes the distinction between the best and 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 201 

whatever falls short of excellence, even if his only 
criterion of the "best" is the cold and desolating fact 
that he is himself excluded from it. He perceives 
that those people who have the best are strong in 
their purpose to keep it and to vindicate for their 
children an inheritance in it ; and if he cannot enter- 
tain the hope of getting it for himself, he will not 
abandon the hope of winning it for his children. The 
desire for education is a desire to keep or to get a 
place in the great society of men. It may lead a man 
astray; he may be attracted rather by what shows 
and ghtters than by what is real and recondite, rather 
by the temporal than by the eternal. But it is a desire 
which may be purified and ennobled, even by the 
trial of disappointment and of long waiting. 

Some very hard problems have to be faced and 
conquered before we can expect to attain a truly 
educated society. Such a society must be made up 
of members who can converse about those things 
which are necessary for their life and for the main- 
tenance of the society which they form. What are 
those necessary things? They are food and housing 
and clothing and exercise for the body; all these must 
be provided ; but they are also an equipment for the 
mind, a housing of the spirit. Now the needs of the 
body have not in fact been provided except by the 
toil of multitudes, who when this toil is done have 
little strength and little time for furnishing their 
minds, their spirits; and this toO has hitherto only 
brought its results because those persons who have 
given to it the labour of their hands have been guided 



202 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [ch. 

and controlled by other persons who being largely 
or wholly free from such labour, have been free to 
devote themselves to the tasks of direction and of 
management. 

It may be indeed that directors and managers are 
not, all of them, conspicuously marked by ability for 
their office; but with such success as they have 
achieved, little or great, they have discharged it, and 
they will not without a struggle allow themselves to 
be dislodged. They are not anxious to change places 
with those others. And if they should be suddenly 
and violently removed from the places which they 
now hold, it is certain that for a time the world would 
move less easily, less comfortably; for if the directors 
and managers have as little native ability as their 
envious detractors allow them, they have the ad- 
vantage of experience; they have learned by ex- 
perience how to do what they have been in the habit 
of doing. But if we ask why they are determined to 
keep their places the answer is quick to come: it is 
because they agree that these places are more to be 
desired than the others, and not only because they 
afford more food and clothing and housing and all 
these of a superior quality, but because in addition 
to all these advantages they afford power, security, 
leisure. Power may be grossly and cruelly used: 
security may bring on a mental and moral obesity; 
leisure, ill spent, may ill deserve the name ; but leisure, 
security, power, men desire and pursue. 

There is a bitter kernel of truth in what Phocylides 
says, "that when one has got enough to live on, one 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 203 

should practise excellence 1." A carpenter has a work 
to do, and if he should be prevented, by illness for 
example, from doing it, he might say that life for 
him would not be worth living; but he might also say 
that unless he could go on with his work he could 
not live. As Professor Bosanquet remarks in his 
short but lucid note on this passage, "Excellence, for 
Plato, means doing something welP." The excellence 
which a carpenter can achieve is that of doing a 
carpenter's work well, of proving himself, by the 
quality of his work, an excellent carpenter. But, 
when he has done this, he may have little or nothing 
left of time and of energy for doing anything else 
well, for achieving excellence in any other activity; 
and if he seeks leisure, however nobly he may hope 
to employ it, at the price and on the condition of 
neglecting his carpentering, he will lose, with his 
trade, his livelihood. What then is he to do, if while 
he plies his trade or, in such few and hard won 
moments of repose as he can win from it, he uneasily 
guesses at excellence of another kind, and allows him- 
self in pardonable day-dreams the hope of achieving 
it by fulfiUing the function of a carpenter and some 
other function in addition! Is he to quench the hope ; 
is he to put away his dreams? And what are we, the 
other members of the society to which he belongs 
and in which he plays his necessary part, to say to 
him? Dare we make use of " one splendid falsehood^," 

^ Plato, Rep. Ill 407 A. 

2 Education of the Young in the Republic of Plato, p. 113. 

* Plato, Rep. Ill, 4143. 



204 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [ch. 

selecting it from those other "convenient falsehoods" 
with which we try to maintain the arrangement of 
society in orders, grades, professions, trades, to which 
we have grown accustomed? 

We may proclaim the dignity of labour, and ac- 
knowledge that for every order in our society there is 
an appropriate work, which its members must do; we 
may with Plato believe that justice, that central and 
unifying principle which holds society together, is 
nothing but " every man's minding his own business " ; 
but we shall still have to say that one business, one 
work is not another, and one is higher than another 
in a scale of values which we with difficulty define 
but which we with conviction adopt. Even for a man 
whose business or work is higher than that of the rest, 
the question may arise, sharp as a sword, whether he 
is fit for his high task. This is a question which a 
man's neighbours may be more ready to ask in clear 
words than he is himself; though a man of finely 
disciplined and sensitive nature may ask it, in silence, 
of himself. For other men whose labour is done upon 
a lower plane the question may be whether their work 
is fit and good enough for them. This is a question 
which they may be more ready to ask for themselves 
than other men for them; though here again men of 
finely disciplined and sensitive nature may not think 
of asking it, or refuse to ask it if it occurs to them, 
for themselves; yet other men, whose work is of a 
different sort, may sometimes ask it on their behalf 
and for the sake of society. 

Are we to pretend or can we constrain ourselves 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 205 

to believe that the carpenter is a carpenter by nature, 
the soldier a soldier by nature, and the man who 
belongs to what till yesterday was called the governing 
class, by nature a governor? Shall we tell over again 
the "Phoenician tale" and say to our fellow citizens 
All of you in the state are brothers; but God in 
fashioning you mingled gold in the creation of as many 
as are iit to be rulers; and silver, in the auxiliaries; and 
iron and brass in the husbandmen and other artificers 1. 

Can we be quite sure of the ingredients; are we satisfied 
that it was God who mingled them in the composition 
of men according to their several orders in the state? 
Certainly this is a story for which we shall find it hard 
to win belief; we may hesitate, as Socrates hesitated, 
to tell it. But it is only a part of the story; an earlier 
part, at once simpler and subtler, we have passed 
over and must now recall. We shall tell 
first the rulers themselves, and the soldiers and next the 
rest of the community as well that all the time we were 
nurturing and educating them, it was so to speak a dream 
in which they thought that all this befell them and was 
done to them ; but in reality they were themselves being 
fashioned and nurtured in the earth beneath, and their 
arms and the rest of their array were being wrought 2. 
Whatever "nature" may have done, here we have 
the open confession that nurture and education have 
done not less to make men what they are, and by 
making them what they are to place and fix them in 
the order in which they now find themselves. Nurture 
and education have preceded their real birth ; it was 
only, "when they were completely finished, that the 

1 Plato, Rep. 414 c, d. 2 gp. cit. 415 A. 



2o6 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [ch. 

earth who was their mother sent them forth." How 
shall we persuade men to beheve all this? We cannot 
hope to persuade those to whom we tell the story, fresh 
and incredible, for the first time. Yet, if it is repeated 
over and over, their children and their children's 
children may learn to accept it, or at least not to ques- 
tion it. The long years in their course may leave upon 
men the deposit of a tradition, which shall first be a 
covering and then an overgrowth and at last fasten itself 
into the very fibre and living tissue of their minds. 

But what time has wrought time can undo; a day 
comes when men are forced upon self-analysis by the 
anomalies of the world which they see ; they unravel 
the web of conventions; they disengage their minds 
from inveterate beliefs, they break the spell of tra- 
dition. Perceiving in a sudden and shocking discovery 
the poverty of their lot, the narrowness of the paths 
in which they have been wont to travel to and fro, 
the sharp limits of their careers, they make the an- 
nouncement, some timidly for their own ears and some 
so that the world may hear, that they are by nature 
other and more than practitioners of their craft, their 
profession, their calling however high or low it may 
be in the social order. They claim to be men^, to live 
with their peers and to converse with them. If in a 
spirit of brotherhood, proud and generous, they greet 
all men as peers and attempt to speak an equal and 
intelligible language with them, they find themselves 
at once at grips again with that riddle to which the 
tradition so painfully and so triumphantly over- 

1 Cf. Aristotle, Eth. Nic. i. 7. 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 207 

thrown was lately the customary, the unchallenged 
answer. 

What is the world in which their new, large con- 
versation is to be held, what is to be their universe 
of discourse? It is a world, or universe, of which 
each one of them is himself the centre ; each one has 
or is his own world, his own universe. The circle in 
which he dwells and about the horizon of which his 
hungry eye roves is cut indeed by many other circles; 
but even if the centre of any one of these should fall 
within the circumference of his own he cannot take 
his stand upon it : it is held impregnably by another 
man, and for himself he must stay, a prisoner after 
all, upon the centre of his circle. And with many 
circles he can share only a little segment of common 
ground; the greater part of most of them must lie 
outside and beyond his boundaries. He may be 
tempted to imagine that, as of those worlds of which 
he sees parts there are other parts withheld from his 
scrutiny, so yet further again in a vaster world, in 
a universe not of "his discourse" at all, there are 
spheres not undreamed but certainly unknown. But 
who shall say of any man that there are not worlds 
of which he does not even dream? Yet from worlds 
not his own but bordering on and overlapping his own 
he draws some things which he needs or desires ; to 
them he contributes what he can or yields what is 
by force taken from him. 

He is fain to solve his problem, and can think of 
nothing better than the old solution that society is 
brought into being by the stark but reconciling fact 



2o8 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [cil 

that no man is self-sufficing. He needs what others 
have ; he must give what others claim. Loneliness hits 
him hard; he stretches out his hand to other lonely 
men. But it must not be an empty hand : something 
he must have to offer, the produce of his labour spent 
upon his domain, some gift of his own nature culti- 
vated within the confines which hem it in; and, if 
labour is to be thus bestowed and nature so cultivated, 
then every man is once more a craftsman, every man 
has his own profession, is set in an order, a rank once 
more. Co-operation involves division of work, and 
what division more just than that which matches 
aptitude? Or, if the division be unjust, if the allot- 
ment of functions is made by chance and corresponds 
ill or not at all to varieties of nature, then use will 
tame nature and make it subservient to a new tradi- 
tion which the more easily takes the place of the old 
because it is almost exactly like it. 

No man has time, no man is well enough off, to 
reach "excellence" save in that one thing to which 
he devotes himself or is by necessity bound. 

The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity 
of leisure; and he that hath little business shall become 
wise. How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, 
and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth oxen, and is 
occupied in their labours, and whose talk is of bullocks? ^ 

The opportunity of leisure may not be properly prized 
and turned to fruitful use; but without leisure, 
wisdom, if Ecclesiasticus is to be trusted, cannot be 
had; a man may have little business and still be a 

1 Ecclesiasticus xxxviii, 24, 25. 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 209 

fool; yet a man who wiU not keep his mind free and 
at peace, who will not stoutly refuse to be for ever 
busy, will never become wise. A man who has little 
business may indeed fill part of his leisure with the 
contemplation of poverty, as a close neighbour or 
even a partner of his life ; he will not embrace wealth, 
which rarely consorts with leisure, for it is produced 
by busy men and makes busy men busier still. 

The wise man may not desire wealth; but what if 
he desires knowledge of the ways of men? Can he 
get this knowledge if he spends his days and nights 
in meditation, and takes no part in the affairs of 
ordinary folk? Sometimes the recluse and solitary 
man may long to hold a plough, to urge the goad, to 
drive oxen; but he has no skill in these things; for he 
has been occupied in other labours. Is it his ambition 
to frame a theory of state, to plan a new society? 
or, as preliminary to these tasks, to analyse society 
as it is? How can he, without knowledge bought by 
experience of the real activities of real men in the 
world? Can he understand the world imless he will 
engage in its affairs? Let him betake himself to the 
country and he will soon learn that, though men 
whose "talk is of bullocks" have a small vocabulary, 
he cannot use it because he is either wholly ignorant 
of their business, or at any rate imperfectly ac- 
quainted with bullocks. If men who mind cattle have no 
leisure in which to get wisdom, he who seeks wisdom 
in leisure must forgo the experience of graziers. 

Not less certainly must he forgo the special and 
proper experience of every other class of men. The 



210 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [ch. 

carpenter and work-master, the jeweller and the 
smith and the potter — "all these trust to their hands 
and every one is wise in his work" — but not beyond 
his work. And the man of leisure cannot claim to be 
wise in the work of any one of them. If then we say 
that he may achieve "wisdom," his wisdom must 
evidently be of a different sort from the special, the 
specialised, wisdom of these other men. It must be 
general, it must be universal, it must be philosophic. 
Very few men can reach it; very few have qualities 
which entitle them to believe and to declare that leisure 
is their work. And they will be most keenly aware of 
the gulf which is fixed between them and other men. 
We need not say that they can never cross the gulf; 
but they are received as strangers upon its further 
bank, if indeed they are noticed at all, for it is by a 
flight of imagination that they come ghostly visitors, 
not seen, not felt by common sense, and the dwellers 
upon the other side having no wings cannot cross to the 
domain of leisured wisdom. Many of them maynotknow 
that there is such a domain ; many may entertain for it 
the contempt which has its roots in the soil of ignor- 
ance ploughed by doubt ; a few may stretch out yearning 
hands towards it. But all of them are fettered to their 
trades, and ply them as prisoners in separate cells. 

They shall not dwell where they wiU, nor go up and 
down ; they shall not be sought in public counsel nor sit 
high in the congregation: they shall not sit on the judges' 
seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment; they 
cannot declare justice and judgment, and they shall not 
be found where parables are spoken. 

Yet "without these cannot a city be inhabited"; 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 211 

"they will maintain the state of the world, and their 
desire is in the work of their craft." 

If the world is to be maintained in the state with 
which we are familiar or in any state, the work of 
the world must be done ; the work is of many kinds 
and must be distributed among many kinds of men. 
Shall we refuse to divide men into "kinds"? Then 
we divide them into classes, into professions and 
trades. If work of any kind is to be done with the 
utmost efficiency and economy, then the people who 
do it must devote themselves to it ; they can do little 
or nothing beside; their hands will be subdued to 
what they work in ; their minds if not subdued will 
take something of the colour of their hands. It is not 
easy to say that there are not "kinds" of men: it is 
foolish to pretend that there is no danger of men's 
falling into different kinds. It is in fact the recog- 
nition of this danger which has armed us all in defence 
of what is sometimes called our common humanity. 
What men have hated for themselves and for their 
neighbours has been the doctrine, supported by strong 
evidence though not by the whole truth, that the 
carpenter is a carpenter and nothing more, the potter 
a potter and nothing more. 

The carpenter's or the potter's work may be hard, 
it may long have been ill paid, and these conditions 
men may well try to escape or to improve ; but it is 
not these conditions which have galled them and fed 
in them the fever of indignation or lit the fires of 
revolution. It is another condition, branded upon 
them by their neighbours or more terribly burned 
into their hearts by themselves, that to do the work 



212 IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM [ch. 

of their trade, to exercise their craft, was to shut 
themselves into their trade or craft for ever and 
identify themselves with it. They longed to claim 
their share in a "common humanity." But what is 
this common humanity? It is a vast domain of which 
we may all profess ourselves the joint heirs, but it still 
needs tillage, and, though a man's eye may take in 
a wide expanse, he can but till that part of it on 
which he will settle and abide. His neighbours, his 
partners in humanity, are under the same necessity; 
they too must till the plot on which they are; and 
presently the plots become allotments, or gardens or 
orchards or fields fenced about and guarded by 
barriers of privilege, of ownership. Each plot will 
illustrate the individual qualities of the man who has 
worked it ; each man in working it wiU have given, 
with expression, strength to his qualities, and will 
have taken some tincture of the soil which has local 
peculiarities showing through the general character 
of the whole domain. 

He may lift his eyes and try again to survey his 
large inheritance ; he may assure himself that the far 
horizon would yield to keener eyes and retreat if he 
travelled towards it ; but what he will see will be the 
plots in which his neighbours have penned themselves 
with sharp-set hedges or solid walls against his too in- 
quisitive regard, against his presumptuous approach. 
If thanks to increasing skill he has time left him, if 
his labour is done before night falls, he still cannot 
enjoy leisure: he puts down his tools, but his mind 
is still in his furrows. What goes on behind the ram- 



XV] IMPRISONMENT AND FREEDOM 213 

parts where his neighbours, those partners in a 
common humanity, have estabhshed themselves, he 
may ask, but he cannot know; is he to guess that 
they are hke himself; that they are slaves of their 
trade ; is he to suppose that they on their side some- 
times wonder what he is doing and what manner of 
man he is? He may believe that he shares with them 
such imaginings, that they think, when their tale of 
work is finished day by day, of its relation to the work 
of other men and to his own, that they wonder how 
they and he make up a world, or try to figure to 
themselves the significance of "common humanity" 
in the terms of occupations, modes of life which they 
know too well, namely, their own, and in the terms 
which they can, of course, imperfectly use, of modes 
of life, occupations which they know too little, namely, 
those of other men. 

If they dream these dreams, they may seem to 
themselves to reconquer a part of that inheritance 
from which the hard conditions of their life proclaim 
that they are banished. They are the richer and the 
poorer for these dreams : poorer because now a bitter- 
ness flavours their poverty as with gall ; they confess 
themselves prisoners, but they suspect that they were 
born free, or at least that they sprang from no servile 
race ; richer, because though prisoners still they look 
out from between their bars with eyes undimmed. 
They know that they are alive because they suffer 
pain, and would scorn to be eased, even if they 
might, of proof of their indomitable vitality. 



CHAPTER XVI 
SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 

MR FREDERICK GREENWOOD in his Very beautiful 
"Gospel of Content"^ says that a prison is too 
good, and so unsuitable for common rogues and 
thieves: these 

should give place to honest men — ^honest reflective men. . . . 
Imprisonment is wasted on persons of so inferior char- 
acter. Waste it not, and you will have accommodation 
for wise men to learn the monk's lesson (did you ever 
think it all foolishness?) that a little imperious hardship, 
a time of seclusion with only themselves to talk to them- 
selves, is most improving. For statesmen and reformers 
it should be an obligation. 

It may be that if in solitude men will talk to them- 
selves, and reflect upon the theme of their intimate 
discourse, they will find that they have done more 
than a little to make good their right to a common 
humanity, since silence, meditation, and pain are 
essential elements in it. The first fruits of emancipa- 
tion are enjoyed with an ironic satisfaction by men 
who perceive that they are in prison. Others, who 
take the walls which incarcerate them for the utmost 
limits of the world, are by nature prisoners, prisoners 
in their souls; they need to be born again in order 
to learn that what they took for a universe is only 
a cage, through the bars of which they have not even 
been at the pains to look. 

^ The Yellow Booh, vol. ii, July 1894, p. 20. 



CH.xvi] SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 215 

If the popular demand for education were a de- 
mand for the opportunity to reflect, it would be of 
a nobler quality than it can now generally claim to 
be. Instead of that it is put forward with arguments 
for efficiency, for success, for getting on ; and getting 
on means too often getting out of the class, the pro- 
fession, the trade, in which a man's forbears were 
and in which he might not unnaturally remain, and 
getting into another class, or profession or trade to 
which he arrives nouveau riche, awkward or blase or 
both. It is too rarely a demand to enter that world 
in which "parables" are spoken. We may look for- 
ward, if we choose to indulge our fancy, to a day when 
the progress of mechanical invention shall have 
enabled men to do in minutes what now they must 
take hours to do; but vacancy is not leisure and 
cannot yield wisdom; or we may forecast a day when 
mechanical invention shall have spent its energies, 
and when for sheer lack of the material of "civilisa- 
tion" — coal, for instance, being exhausted — we shall 
hail the return of Nature with fields green once more 
and skies clear; yet Nature will prove herself a hard 
mistress and bind burdens upon men's backs which 
they will hardly bear. 

Fancy may paint for us either picture, but not 
persuade us of its truth. For we are unable to plan 
a world in which men do not differ from each other, 
in which varying needs are not to be supplied by 
varying services, or varying services are not to be 
fulfilled by the exercise of varjang gifts. Let us grant 
that any work which a man may do without loss of 



2i6 SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN [ch. 

self-respect he may do with honour; still we cannot 
pretend that all kinds of work are of equal dignity; 
there are some which in the doing and when they 
are done afford more of that leisure in which wisdom 
is garnered; such work any man may be pardoned 
for making the goal of his ambition, but only if upon 
a fair examination of himself he is satisfied that he 
is indeed fit to undertake it. If he is satisfied, or if, 
acknowledging his unfitness for it, he is yet urged 
towards it by an imperious destiny which he cannot 
withstand, then he can be more than pardoned; he 
is justified. He made no vows; vows were made for 
him. And, even so, the vows may receive a strange 
fulfilment ; he may travel a road that he never looked 
to tread, and reaching the goal he may not recognise 
it ; or he may learn that the destiny which he believed 
was pointing quite clearly to one goal was drawing 
him to another. If moved by such influences a man 
seeks to change his station, we may respect his purpose 
even if we cannot approve his judgment. 

But it is under the sway of very different influences 
that many men attempt to make their way into a 
profession, a mode of life, different from that of their 
fathers. They see the outward conditions of leisure ; 
its meaning they do not see; they admire the tran- 
quillity of the leisured man, they do not know the 
"toil unsevered from tranquillity" which he accepts 
as his portion. Thus many persons are attracted by 
the conditions of life which the teacher and the 
student appear to enjoy; and even if it is too late 
for them to get these conditions for themselves they 



XVI] SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 217 

strive to get them for their children. Even now there 
is a certain social consideration granted in some 
quarters to the student and the teacher ; he earns his 
perhaps scanty living without making his hands dirty, 
and, though in a metaphor he may say that he 
" sweats," there is a wonderful difference between the 
language of metaphor and the language of plain facts ; 
and he has holidays. These are conditions which 
seduce the ignorant and unwary. And then there is 
an intellectual vulgarity, which tempts many persons 
to prize knowledge for anything and for everything 
except — itself. And there is a simpler vulgarity which 
sets a high store on degrees which are sought as pretty 
decorations are sought, and worn with the same 
childish ostentation. That a degree represents a stage 
of knowledge and equipment and training which a 
man must pass before he enters upon the independent 
study of any subject is even now not commonly con- 
ceded. 

Persons who make these mistakes cannot speak or 
listen to the language of parables. No more can they 
who, having passed beyond these mistakes or having 
never made them, have yet become completely en- 
grossed in one or another of the now almost in- 
numerable special departments of science or of 
learning. Parables have a local colour, but an infinite 
significance. Men who use parables exhibit at their 
highest development the qualities specially charac- 
teristic of their calling, but interpreting them in a 
free translation then carry them beyond the confines 
of that calling whatever it may be, and dare to invade 



2i8 SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN [ch. 

other regions in quest of allies, of understanding 
friends. But few there are who venture upon these 
excursions, and even they must return again and 
again to their own business. Some allies they may 
have found, but in many eyes they will have looked 
which give back no gleam of recognition, to many 
men they will have spoken yet so as not to be under- 
stood. And if they ask for an explanation they have 
to confess that those to whom they made their appeal 
were warped by the different conditions of their own 
work. 

In every age there have been men who have had 
in hand and carried in their heart the work and the 
responsibility of government. How that trust came 
to be set in them or by what generous arrogance they 
took upon themselves that task we need not here 
enquire. Let us assume that the confidence of their 
fellows was not misplaced, that their own assurance 
was well grounded in their fitness. It is clear that, if 
they were to do what they undertook to do, if they 
were to govern and direct a community, they must 
devote themselves to that business. If we admit that 
it is a general, we must also agree that it is a special 
business, calling for the exercise of no ordinary powers ; 
and that if these powers are to be fully and benefi- 
cently exercised they must be cultivated with unre- 
mitting care. 

The governors of a community must, more than the 
members of any other class, mind their own business. 
But, if they mind their own business, how can they 
know in sufficient detail and with the vivid certainty 



XVI] SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 219 

of experience any business other than their own? 
A general view may be and often is indistinct, and a 
general statement colourless. To reflect upon prin- 
ciples may so much tax a man's powers that he has 
none to spare for making himself acquainted with 
practice in any one of the fields of activity in which 
he hopes that his principles will serve for guidance 
and support : and men who are engaged day in day 
out in these fields may have neither time nor patience 
to listen to him. They may even bitterly resent his 
counsels, if he offers any; they may bid him mind 
his business, meaning that they do not wish him to 
mind theirs. Yet it is his business to mind their 
business. 

Some examples show what is the difficulty in which 
a "governor" is placed. A man may hold a pre- 
eminent place in politics, he may be acclaimed a 
statesman even by his opponents. Let us say that 
he comes of a family in which statescraft has been a 
long and honourable tradition and in which with the 
tradition the equipment of wealth and social dis- 
tinction have descended as a legacy from generation 
to generation; let us say, moreover, that his own 
abilities enable him easily and naturally to play, 
though no doubt with differences, such as new times 
enforce, the part which his people have played before 
him. Such a man may, we presume, from time to 
time ask himself how much he really knows of the 
conditions of life of the multitude over whom he 
stands at a height of advantage, perhaps unchallenged 
and unquestioned by any critic but himself. Or if he 



220 SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN [ch. 

has critics and if these grudge him his pre-eminence 
or think him too remote from the daily concerns of 
his countrymen to be able to judge their needs accu- 
rately, must he not at once confess that there is much 
truth in their censure? What he desires is to under- 
stand them; but can he enter into their lives, can he 
get first-hand knowledge of the lives of merchants 
and manufacturers and mechanics? Not into the life 
of any one of them can he enter, and, though he may 
have reason to suppose that none of them could 
understand the rest of their fellows in any class better 
than he does, he knows that he is alone, not merely 
because he cannot share their daily work, but because 
he imperfectly understands what to each one of them 
that work means. 

Another man may make his way from an obscure 
but decent home to a political position where he holds 
the gaze of his country and of the world; holds it, 
that is to say, when they have time and inclination 
to look at him, and indeed many men may look at 
him with a feeling like family pride as having risen, 
by merit, " from their ranks." But in his high station 
he may figure to himself what life was in that par- 
ticular "rank" from which he came; to that he be- 
longed and not to another; and years of separation 
from the place of his origin must dim his memory. 
Sometimes he may long to be restored to his home, 
but he knows himself to be, for all his affection, not 
only distanced, but alienated from it. He too dwells 
alone ; he too lacks knowledge of these very conditions 
with which his early experience might have enabled 



XVI] SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 221 

him, so men think, with special skill and certainty of 
touch to deal. Again a bishop must mind the business 
of his diocese or a headmaster of his school; but a 
bishop or a headmaster may, we conceive, sometimes 
long to set down the burdens of general administra- 
tion and take up afresh the vivid work of a parish 
priest or an assistant master. Yet these men, like 
others put in authority, are expected to understand 
men from the routine of whose experience they are 
necessarily removed. It may be that by a jest of 
fortune they have been removed from work which 
they loved for the very reason which might well have 
bound them to it for ever, namely, that they did it 
supremely well. The greater their success in their 
new office, and the better they understand those whom 
it is their business to direct, the sharper will be their 
pain in realising that after all they understand but 
little. If they know where the shoe pinches, they do 
not know how hard it pinches. They too are isolated 
and feel the distress of isolation. 

Yet once and again a man who has never occupied 
a place will so speak to men whose lives are spent in 
it as to make them believe that he understands it 
better than they, and that he understands them better 
than they understand themselves. And even he will 
come short of full comprehension. But we marvel 
not at his failure, but much rather at his success. 
How then, we ask, has he done the impossible thing, 
and won success in conditions which seemed finally 
to deny it? The pain of solitude he has suffered to 
refine his spirit as with fire, and meditation has 



222 SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN [ch. 

tempered it, and silence has given it an edge as of 
a blade which cuts through the trammels of circum- 
stance to the heart of things. Whatever else education 
may bring, it must bring willingness to endure pain, 
to practise meditation, to keep silence. It will not 
of course teach men that they should look for nothing 
but pain, take no exercise but meditation, or keep 
silence for ever; but it may teach them that in silence 
some meanings may be communicated which words 
will not carry; that meditation maybe had not only 
in cloisters but in crowds by those who would bring 
their minds to an athletic vigour under its discipline; 
that pain is a common possession. It is thus that 
loneliness, felt and guessed, becomes a pledge and 
bond of society, that individuality becomes signifi- 
cant. These are the gifts which education brings, and 
not gifts wholly unlike these — not a bold and cla- 
morous speech, not temerity in action, not brazen 
advertisement, not the fevered pursuit of pleasure and 
advancement. These are not the only gifts of educa- 
tion; but it is by these that any others are to be 
tested. We deceive ourselves when we speak of the 
gifts of education or its prizes as if they could be 
separated from the process of education ; and we may 
even deceive ourselves by using the plural, for the 
gifts of education cannot be sundered one from 
another : they are elements in an indivisible whole. 

Familiar and necessary figures of speech may mis- 
lead us; we must indeed employ them, but with 
caution. A runner may win a prize; it is something 
which when the race is over he takes away from the 



XVI] SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 223 

course. But if education is a process its prizes are the 
sum of the experiences which a man has gained not 
at the end of the process (for he never attains the 
end) but at any point at which he may have arrived. 
So far as we can estimate the sum of his experiences, 
we know his life, we know what manner of man he is. 
A man may claim some knowledge of mathematics 
and music, or of Greek and Latin, or of shorthand 
and book-keeping, or of plumbing and glazing ; if his 
possessions are only such as can be thus named, then 
whether they are few or many they will not avail to 
teach him the general language of men or give him 
a claim to common humanity; he wiU speak the 
language of a class or a coterie or a school and live 
within its imprisoning conventions and prejudices. 
With these or without these possessions, and with 
few or many others of whatever sort, if he has learned 
the art of silence and of meditation and has endured 
with his fellows the common pain of solitude, then 
he can speak the general language and vindicates his 
part in the commonwealth of men. 

If we call a man in whom we recognise this high 
achievement a good man, are we compelled to say 
that a man may be equally good whether he is 
illiterate or learned, skilled or unskilled in any of the 
crafts and businesses of the world? We may bid a 

Sweet maid, be good, 
And let who will be clever, 

because we have to accept cleverness where it exists 
as a misfortune quite irremediable unless it is cloaked 



224 SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN [ch. 

and happily concealed at last by maid or man whom 
years have taught some gentle consideration for other 
people. But we shall hardly bring ourselves to say 
to boy or girl, to man or woman, "You may be ever 
so good, though to be sure you are never so stupid." 
There is no need to pretend that goodness cannot 
spread its beneficent influence more widely if the 
good man commands the instruments of knowledge 
and of skill ; but he does not command them if they 
are merely instruments. To command them he has 
to appropriate them as a painter appropriates his 
brush, making it one with himself, or a musician his 
violin, or a cricketer his bat. Or, if we grant that 
these figures of speech ill satisfy us, then we must say 
that goodness commands its instruments with a finer 
precision, with a more masterful intimacy, than any 
other excellence can show. 

Will the charge be made that every line in this book 
is a plea for a sequestered and impractical mysticism? 
The charge is sure to be brought, but not by those 
who know by the contrast of sound how to value 
silence, by the contrast of quick and varied activities 
in the world how to value meditation, by the contrast 
of pleasures little or great how to savour the quality 
of pain. Sound and activity and pleasures all cease 
to be significant for men who will never withdraw 
from them; such men have no scale of values and 
become incapable of appreciation. It is in silence 
that men learn to listen, it is in meditation that 
they learn to act, happiness then lightens their 
faces when pain has traced upon them its trans- 



XVI] SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 225 

figuring lines and turned mere suffering into sym- 
pathy. 

Even this is less than the splendid and surprising 
truth. The habit of silence, which a man may impose 
upon himself and commend to his neighbours for their 
imitation, is itself the habit of listening raised to its 
highest tension, and yet a habit in which his spirit 
is so well balanced and so perfectly adjusts its powers 
that tension is not strain. It gives him the right to 
enjoy "heard melodies" because he knows that those 
"unheard are sweeter." Heard melodies may be 
heard amiss, and variously discussed, each hearer 
hearing something different from what his neighbours 
hear. The unheard may be, beyond interpretation, 
but within acceptance and common understanding, 
the "music of humanity." It is to this that in silence 
men attune their ears and so become judges of that 
fragmentary and incomplete music which forms itself 
in sounds. 

It is men who have practised meditation, and have 
in that supreme activity made the muscles of their 
minds at once firm and lissome, who can turn them- 
selves with easy versatility to the distracting engage- 
ments of the world, set them in a pattern, give them 
with order unity, and endure them with an im- 
faltering courage. Silence and meditation give pain 
its medicine by making it intelligent. Not that pain 
is pain the less when it is thus encountered and 
treated; it is pain the more, and heightened to the 
pitch where personal becomes universal suffering. 

Is this then the end, the object to set before our- 



226 SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN [ch. 

selves? So long as education remains a process we 
may look for nothing better. When the art of con- - 
versation has been mastered by all men, then per- 
fection may carry the title of happiness complete and 
general; but not till then. Till then sensibihty wUl 
mean a quickness to feel pain, with the vigour and 
the fortitude to accept and even to welcome it. For, 
though the barriers which divide men may be weak- 
ened and some of therti be overthrown, some will still 
remain. The work of the. worldi^ncludes a variety of 
labours, donejmder many Conditions. Some of these 
labours 'and seme of these conditions will tend to . 
%iake sHence'' rare> Mud meditation hard, and pain 
unintelligent. Some silence men may win, and seitfe- 
meditatitM they may practise wherever their lot may 
be cast, their loneliness of pain may not be wholly 
unlit by sympathy and understanding; yet of these 
good things they will have not enough. The movement 
of the world seems to be towards more minute and 
more mechanical specialisation of work and so towards 
a harder isolation of man from man ; and it seems to 
become more noisy and more rapid as it hurrieis them 
breathlessly forward, $Md so silence and meditation 
may become for manjrmore difficult to win and to 
keep. Perhaps we are' bn the eve pf some reorganisa- , 
tion of industry; perhaps scientific discovery is leading 
us to some fresh unity of law perceived, understood 
and applied; perhaps philosophy will offer a new and 
creative re-construction. Yet the dawn is delayed; 
arid till it comes those who have little of the wealth 
which silence 'and nieditation and sen$ibihty .afford 



n^ 



%. ^■■» "' '' ' 

t^^xvfl SILENCE, MEDITATION AND PAIN 227 

5|i • ■ftni6l'*''preserve and use what they have; and who 
i'knpws? perhaps its coming will be hastened by those 
who, having more than their neighbours of this wealth, 
Aay with a " spontaneous and exuberant self-denial ^ " 
lose it or risk losing it, by taking up the burdens 
w^i^cji now weigh most heavily on men who have the 
teast> strength to carry them. • 

^^ Kewman, Parochial anH Plain Sermons, vol. vii, p. 91. 
J^gmans, Green and Co. - 






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-> PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY J. B. PEACE; 

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